Ponzi Schemes, Private Yachts, and a Missing $250M in Crypto: Quadriga
vanityfair.com
vanityfair.com
But the one thing that gives me pause is a Globe & Mail investigative piece confirming Cotten's death. They looked hard, in India, and the story held up. Then again maybe the reporters just got hoodwinked. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-how-did-gerald...
So no, no benefit of the doubt here; obviously there was some sort of scam going on. The question is, what? There's a lot of possibilities! And a lot of them would involve Cotten being really, truly dead, so the Globe and Mail investigation, even if accurate, doesn't narrow things down much.
My first thought for cryptocurrency when it first came out was "Oh, look, easy money if I felt like throwing my scruples and morals aside and actively participate in this!"
I'm still broke, so obviously I didn't sell myself out. Meanwhile many others I know who got involved in this are now facing IRS Audits and in one case criminal charges.
I'm somewhat glad my foresight saved me from ever making more than like fifteen cents and a couple 'free' pizzas off of this stuff years and years ago and getting potential charges. Knowing the disasters of a distributed database that works without explicit human permissions and checks like what we did in the late 70s, I dodged a big bullet, IMHO.
I've been involved with 'blockchain' since the 70s when it was called Permissionless Distributed Database.
You're just perpetuating what we knew to be an untenable and unsustainable idea roughly 40 years ago. That in and of itself is dishonest to anyone with actual knowledge of the subject.
I’m not a big crypto guy, but a lot of the problems of it seem to be baked in: the decentralization of it attracts a slew of Libertarian types who believe that if someone gets scammed, it’s their fault. There has to be what, thousands of coins? How many are legitimate operations?
It sucks because the promise of the technology is held back so much by all of this fraud, and from what I see, people are so reticent to call it what it is because they’re financially tied to the sector. But there is really zero public confidence in this space - and even less in terms of realistic use cases for everyday people - that stories like this feel like another nail in the coffin.
In the late 90’s all of a sudden you were able to do incredible things for the first time, like search for and buy plane tickets without a travel agent, send messages to friends instantly without long distance charges, research academic subjects, order out of print books, sell and buy collectibles, share music instantly with anyone in the country. It was obvious that the web was solving tons of problems for people and delivering value.
It was obviously amazing. It was also over hyped and a magnet for fraudsters too.
When the dust clears it’s going to be obvious that outside of the nifty and genuinely value-creating use case of e-commerce for illegal drugs, the entire crypto “industry” will have proven to be completely composed of either naive speculators or outright criminals, with the latter having completely consumed the former.
I guess we need to see one go public to find out.
I'm very optimistic on the future, and you continue to see companies and governments engage with crypto because it's simply better, whether they want it to be or not. More efficient, less expensive, faster, less red tape. Many wish it would just disappear, but it doesn't because it continues to be useful, and spider out to ever more industries and use cases.
It might take decade(s), but I work with individuals and companies that move tens of millions every day around the world without any bank interference. It's very clearly the future, the only question in my mind is how long it will take to overcome existing systems.
That's not a building block coming out of crypto, it's the application of traditional finance to make it useful. And when you've solved all of the problems, the core technology ends up being pointless. But I'm convinced it will have an effect in the long run, because it will infect traditional banking and eventually in some unforseen way destabilize it. Just because it's so irrationally attractive.
A technology that is almost 40+ years old, free of legacy cruft. That's absolutely hilarious.
But no real excuse for those holding coins/cash on an exchange for a second longer than necessary.
What is “counterfeit Bitcoin”?
Imagine you log into an exchange, deposit another crypto like LTC, exchange it for "BTC" and never actually withdraw it. how can you be sure that there is actual BTC behind your account?
It's probably happening right now.