Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

[1] Curries favor with the awardees, creates an 'in group' etc...

I wonder what all the white paper consultants are doing now that their profession is over?

Probably working on a cannabis company.

I don't understand how that becomes a reference point for any region being known for fake deaths. The search results in fact make it look like someone used his death to slander a whole region.

There are companies that have stocks of decades or century-old paper that they use to forge aged government documents. I can't find a link to a story at the moment :-(

> But that's a feature, not a bug, at least according to the crypto people. But, so far, all they have managed to do is rediscover lessons about the need for regulation, oversight and accountability that the financial industry has learnt decades or even centuries ago.

I feel this is only true for people who have not truly embraced the decentralized aspect of cryptocurrency. For example, many people leave all of their money in one wallet. Centralization. Many people use only one exchange for converting fiat to crypto. Centralization. The harder you look, the more you will find that the only people upset about the state of cryptocurrencies are those that did not diversify and instead reverted to a concept squarely against the cryptocurrency ethos.

Thus is human nature. Who wants to manage 30,000 wallets each containing only a few dollars? The supporting tooling is not there (or is not easy enough to use) and thus we see this recurrent user pattern.

Have you met any of those people? Do they actually exist or are you imagining them?

I think the most important societal issue is that it damages investor and consumer confidence.

As a parallel, consider food regulation. When I go into a store or restaurant, the food I buy is very likely to be safe, because there are a lot of regulators making sure it happens. If they weren't operating, then I'd have to exert a lot more effort to make sure that each thing I eat is safe. Not only would this be a giant waste of effort, but it would significantly reduce the opportunity for innovation and cost reduction, because people would be reluctant to try new products and new restaurants.

Market confidence is even more important for finance, because it's much harder for individuals to know if a given company is really working. It would be a huge problem for society if everybody went back to keeping their money in mattresses and physically moving it everywhere.

You shouldn't have to pay a penny, the industry should be taxed so that the regulation is self-funded.

We can't legislate about "rational actors," but we CAN and SHOULD legislate about "perfect information." Any information hiding is essentially fraud or theft from the rest of the market, because it creates an information asymmetry distortion.

We could for example say that registered companies don't get company benefits (protection of owners from bankruptcy and protection of board from personal liability and such) unless they continually and regularly publish the full (even unaudited) books, not just the occasional brief filings we require now. That would benefit everybody in the market, except those who thrive on fraud and information asymmetry.

USA: https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/audited-annual-fi...

Canada: https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/annua...

England: https://news.sky.com/story/kpmg-faces-fight-t

Doesn't make us whole of course, but it is nice.

Many places

This is how banks deal with the potential for loosing money too, except they have a mixture of private insurance, SROs insurance and state insurance. These things added confidence to their market, centralized crypto services do this too. QuadrigaCX did not.

Plenty of coin movements in an exchange aren't going to make it onto the chain. If I sell on Coinbase and someone else on Coinbase buys it, there's no reason for Coinbase to incur fees to publish that to everyone; they can just shuffle money around on paper.

Washing crypto would seem even more difficult because transactions are all accounted for. So I'd assume a cleaner would need to have random time variance in redistribution so collisions aren't found. But also, money has to be spent or converted, so that's a big way you could uncover it. Money is harder because cash is still a thing.

1) See that money is transferred from account to washer (instant flag)

2) Search for accounts associated with initial fraud and watch for extraction.

It was my basically uninformed impression that the bitcoin blockchain consists of a series of transaction records that look like this:

- Address xxxxx1x sends 10 bitcoins to address xxxxx2x; address xxxxx7x mints 25 bitcoins

That is to say, the records show that balances increase and decrease, but there is no actual concept of a uniquely identifiable bitcoin (with, say, a serial number) -- there are only balances held by accounts. On this model, it isn't possible to say that other people's coins end up in your destination wallets. Is that not accurate?

(The fact that you can divide one bitcoin into 100,000,000 satoshi also suggests that there's no such thing as an individual bitcoin...)

1) My understanding is, every transaction in bitcoin is public knowledge forever as part of the forever growing block chain. That is, there is no way to ever remove a transfer.

2) The only anonymity built in bitcoin is to hide your identity with pseudonymity, nobody necessarily knows your bitcoin address you are using. However if you are buying coins with credit card for example from person A and spend those at person B, person A will know that you have just spend that money at person B, and person B will know that you bought the coins from person A.

3) The only way(?) to hide, make the transactions anonymous is via tumbling, that is you send your coins into a huge account outside your control that aggregates maybe millions of $ from thousands of people and then sends them out again into random addresses. Nobody except the provider of the tumble service knows where your money went, making you anonymous, your money untraceable. I assume you want to repeat this process a few times with different tumble services.

Is that correct? I'm no expert. Also with 3) how feasible is that with $130 million? I mean to successfully tumble wouldn't I need at least double the amount probably much much more? How large are the tumbles in services such as bestmixer.io? Also it seems to me that with enough heuristics even tumble services could potentially be traced back, this doesn't seem impossible to me?

E&Y’s own reports say that it was the Applicant’s own “expert” that tried to break in.

The applicant is the founder’s widow.

The expert doesn’t seem to have much of a specialization for breaking into computers. Who knows what kind of mess he caused.

S. 12

https://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Quadriga%20Fin...

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#Missi... NSA's eavesdropping mission includes radio broadcasting, both from various organizations and individuals, the Internet, telephone calls, and other intercepted forms of communication. Its secure communications mission includes military, diplomatic, and all other sensitive, confidential or secret government communications.[51]

So if you send (part of) your balance to another account, that can be seen. If that account sends on a similar amount, that also can be tracked. (Even if you split it between multiple accounts by sending to multiples of them.) The only way you can lose sight of the money if goes to an account that has a (relatively) large number of incoming and outgoing transactions. That can be a person actively paying and earning in BTC (and then you caught whoever stole the money) or a mix. It collects incoming transactions from a large number of addressess (accounts) and then sends these out to a large (but differing) number of other addresses. All you see is constant incoming and outgoing transactions of different values, that add up to (almost) 0 over a long period of time. But you won't be able to correlate them (and no coins exist that could have an identity, just balances).

EDIT: Side note - the way actually BTC works, they don't store your balance (as, I think, ETH does), i.e. the balance of an address (account), only the transactions. The balance can be calculated from the sum of all the transactions for that specific address (incoming ones add, outgoing ones subtract from it).

The mixer then transfers 37, 185, 205, 1002, and other random amounts to other accounts, which in turn transfers it to other accounts, and at some point they get funneled to one or more accounts owned by the person who originally transferred the money into the mixer.

Couple this with a lot of other people doing the same at the same time for the same mixer service, and you cannot say who owns the coins being transferred between the accounts. It is public what money was transferred back and forth, but without some serious analysis it's practically impossible to track who is likely to own the accounts where the money end up.

On Monday, all three addresses send all their BTC to address #4. The next day, address #4 sends the coins back to addresses #5 through #7.

Which address out of #5, #6 or #7 has the original BTC you were interested in?

Sorry, what?

On an exchange you have no proof.