Confessions of a Bitcoin Widow
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
It just seems surprising that no one seems to actually investigate and prosecute those who make death threats online. I'm not saying that people should lose anonymity online in the vast majority of cases, but when people are making death threats and even coordinating and conspiring to harass someone with death threats and potential real-world harm, it seems like police should be getting warrants for things like IP addresses, device IDs, browser fingerprints, phone numbers, and other anti-spam information that sites are using.
I know some people know a lot about how they're being tracked online, but most people don't. If there are hundreds of people posting death threats, most probably aren't hiding who they are well. Prosecuting even a few seems like it would deter a lot more. How confident are you that you aren't leaving a trail? I'm not saying that people should be generally worried about leaving a trail, but when it comes to death threats that can turn into actual murder people seem oddly confident that no one will track them down - despite all we know about how good platforms like Facebook are at figuring out who we really are.
It's not like police aren't asking for huge warrants from people like Google. Google has said that they're getting a huge number of geofence warrants - "hey, give us a list of everyone who has been in this geographic area." That seems way more problematic than "hey, there has been a criminal assault (death threat) and we want all identifying information you have on this account that committed the assault." Again, I'm not saying that the person behind the account should instantly be found guilty (accounts can be hacked and such), but it seems to offer a much more precise avenue of getting to bad people than a geofence warrant with a lot fewer privacy implications.
> I contacted Facebook. The best the company could suggest was to block trolls from future posts
Facebook knows who these people are. They could ban them from FB/WhatsApp/Instagram. It's weird because they seem like the type of thing you'd want to ban for SPAM/harrassment.
It seems weird that the response from sites and police seems to be: there's nothing we can do. These are the same sites that figure out things voting rings for anti-spam reasons. These are the same police that vigorously want to prosecute someone for stealing $20. But when it comes to death threats (that can turn into actual murder), they seem to think "that seems like a minor inconvenience compared to SPAM or someone stealing $20."
These organizations have enormous budgets and they can't solve simple, non-violent crimes. Why do they need more funding and resources? Is all of that double OT going to finally stop those "brazen" CVS pickpockets?
American police are hot, smelly garbage.
Most other countries have much more intelligent and professional police forces.
What you've described isn't an innate factor of law enforcement. It's a factor of shit quality, cut price, American law enforcement (the biggest factor is the absurd fragmentation of local police departments).
I mean I could tell you who did a robbery, but proving it to the criminal standard of proof is a very different proposition.
Burglary isn't getting solved without a) CCTV and a subsequent ID or b) DNA or fingerprints.
I work on a busy (and I mean busy) robbery squad. An 11% detection rate puts us head and shoulders above the rest of the organisation.
I suggest you go for a police ride-along or listen to dispatch to learn what it's really like. And police are still at the mercy of the laws and courts which can make their efforts ineffective. You can catch all the criminals you want but it won't do anything if they're let out immediately with no consequences.
This is a slippery slope, I can see it being abused real quick. So I tend to think that police isn’t meant to directly prevent me from getting killed. Police is meant for arresting the culprits, and that would indirectly prevent me from getting killed because it’s not worth the risk.
They do quite a lot of it. Everything from simply having police presence to keeping track of bad actors. But there's only so much they can do before a criminal act begins.
However I recently saw the police raid my neighbor in full swat gear cause someone on Nextdoor said they saw a guy walking down the street with a gun (it turned out to be a cane). About 15 out of shape suburban dads playing operator terrifying children and high fiving each other after literally doing nothing. I don't value this institution very much anymore.
Cleveland PD showed up, shrugged their shoulders, gave me a police report for my home insurance claim (which covered nothing that was stolen) and said there was no chance the crime would be solved.
A few weeks later I had to contact the same CPD district office because someone I sold something to online threatened me with physical violence and showed up at my house at 11 PM to "settle the matter." I went to the police station and was again told directly by the police there was nothing they could do, even though the man was parked outside of my home at the time, waiting for me to engage.
Absolutely worthless institution.
The point is that property crime is still minor in comparison to how serious a crime is, for example homicide. It also means that resources will be less available as a result.
Also most of the problems are due to a lack of prosecution (in the SF area). Police can't do much if criminals just get immediately released without consequence.
Like I said, even if the police do find and arrest this person, it's still up to the courts to prosecute. It's a lot of work between the court proceedings with testimonies and evaluations to get a conviction. Some regions like California are very reluctant to bring charges and just release them instead, which is why police will avoid dealing with the matter in the first place.
It was a French woman who used some app to track her running habits that also had a social component, where you could interact with people in your area, compare stats, message them etc. There was someone on there who messaged her a couple times asking if they could run together some time, but apparently in a really creepy way, so she declined and later ignored it. She'd run in the evenings along the Rhine river, and one evening she hears someone catching up to her from behind, and next thing she remembers is she's lying in some bushes, a guy standing next to her saying he already called the cops as he saw from a distance someone knock her out from behind, then pulling her off the walkway. The guy started shouting like crazy that he'd already called the cops, and the attacker ran away immediately. When she made her statement a couple hours later at the police station, the suspicious profile on that running app was deleted. The French cops then contacted the company behind the app to get any information possible about that user, some US startup, which denied the request due to privacy concerns. And that's the end of the investigation. It's the closest they ever got to that guy.
Online stuff is hard because it usually requires cooperation of multiple police forces in different jurisdictions. I think it often just comes down to there being easier things to go after closer to home.
I don’t know why Facebook does nothing though.
For example, https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article24376685... documents the purchase for a 90,000 resident city in NC of Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles for $500,000.00 each.
“I’d rather have the armored capability and not need it, than to need it and not have it,” [Concord Police Chief Gary J. Gacek] said in an email to The Charlotte Observer.
Sometimes you just gotta choose what you go after.
This is strictly not true. The police choose not to have resources dedicated to many kinds of crimes. US police funding exceeds what almost all countries spend on defense. Police in America act as a significant source of revenue for many communities (through tickets, fines, and forfeiture).
Also the US is the 3rd biggest country in the world with a very complex blend of groups and cultures. It's obviously going to have more funding in general by sheer size.
Doing nothing about this does encourage its behavior, especially since there's entire communities around doing it (kiwi farms being one of the worst).
Social networks show their true colors by way of the decisions they make about what to prioritize removal of and what to actively ignore even once they are made clearly aware.
Source: Used to work in this exact team at FB
Sounds great until you find out the threat was sent by someone in a different country halfway around the world. There's a finite amount of police manpower, and I'd be willing to bet that most death threats are practically impossible to prosecute even with a warrant.
Police are local, and have no effective jurisdiction online, excxept when they have a local victim and local suspect.
You need the FBI.
and for every murder with an online threat, there are a million "free speech" death threats with no murder.
Online forums generally don't adjudicate whether subpoenas meet some objective standard of jurisdiction. It's not so much that police cannot investigate a crime for a local victim when the suspect could be in another jurisdiction, it's just that it likely won't lead to a prosecution. But I'd bet that a nastygram on a police department letterhead would go a long way towards discouraging most internet haters.
I'm not pointing this out as a desirable state of affairs (it's essentially government-capital synergy aka fascism), but rather a possibility of where things might head. Burbclaves applying their customary/statutory powers to interactions in the interconnected world, and offering their services up as a point of competition.
Then i remembered the geofencing warrants and surveillance platforms they have access to. I remembered nearly going deaf when the police fired a flashbang at my head for getting too close to a group of nazis that myself and other locals wanted to shoo back to the state they came from.
I remembered the police arent here to protect the vulnerable, they are here to protect freedom of speech.
Dont worry i grew out of my juvenile delusion that i have any ability to influence or refuse to tolerate certain discourse in my city.
Nazis rallying in your city is just a sign of how well protected and safe you are i guess. Ill make sure to stay home next time.
> I remembered the police arent here to protect the vulnerable, they are here to protect freedom of speech.
The police, like every entrenched power structure, are "there to" serve their own interests. Sometimes that's expressed in terms of lofty ideals, but it's fundamentally about power relationships - for instance their casually attacking you with an explosive.
If you were someone "important" - politically connected, rich and looking like it, or even just upper-middle but persistent, it's likely they would have responded to your brother's issue with more attention. And if they mistakenly judged you and didn't, you would escalate to their superiors. That dynamic isn't a free pass, but it informally goes a long way.
My point was this attention could very well shift to putting a priority on policing online threats, perhaps even to the detriment of investigating physical crime.
Strangely enough am family friends with the person likely to become chief. I doubt ill ever raise the issue because i dont think he would be able to have any positive effect without losing the position.
Entrenched.
Taking the tinfoil hat off, I genuinely think that federal governments are disinterested in small time, low hanging fruit.
I also consider the police to be first responders at best. Once a crime has been completed, the perpetrators are likely to straight up just get away with it due to the ineptitude and bloat inherent in a police force.
Seems like that'd be a red flag, considering it's a digital currency.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadriga_Fintech_Solutions
Keeping the cash at home wasn’t a good idea, but being blocked from using traditional solutions necessitated that they build their own.
Since essentially ALL banks are FDIC insured, taking money from a business selling cannabis, which is illegal under Federal law, is prohibited. There have been multiple documentary/news show episodes about this.
Interesting side fact, NPR Planet Money did a special where they tried to find a bank that was NOT FDIC insured. They picked the smallest single physical location bank they could find but even that bank was FDIC insured.
What kind of business with ATMs "takes the money home"?
Even if it's totally legit, it's also totally insecure - they could be robbed at any time.
Money in such quantities are not takes to the home and stacked the kitchen top, they are deposited to banks - by armored guards in vans.
The kind where $200M of customers' money "goes missing" and the ceo "suddenly dies" on a holiday to a country famous for its scam artists?
Whereas the parent commented that "they might had simply taken the money from the ATMs home" as an excuse for them being a legit business while having stacks of cash on their kitchen tops.
Definitely not ideal, but what else can they do?
The issues at the beginning was use of non-standard sized bill receptors and non-digital vaults at the ATMs but that has been solved recently. At the time, we used two ideas: provide a regular ATM right next to the Bitcoin ATM to dispense bills out (so we'd get ACH) and regular pickups and drop-offs to a bank.
Unbanked businesses? Some of them because they are illicit, but others exist because banks don’t want the association.
I sold my GPU for $2500 yesterday. Cash please. It's currently lying on my kitchen counter.
Now, piles may be crazier, but sell a Tesla?
I had a friend who was moving country and wanted to sell his Porche. Someone offered to buy it for a reasonable price, but wanted to pay cash. My friend thought that sounded really dodgy; so he agreed on the condition that they both physically go to a bank teller and have the bank teller deposit the money in his account as he watched. The other guy agreed; so that's what they did. He showed up with a giant bag full of bills, just like the big drug deals in the movies. At that point my friend felt he'd done his duty, and that anything dodgy to be Somebody Else's Problem to detect / deal with.
Afterwards I heard that Travelers prefer dealing in cash; so there wasn't necessarily anything dodgy going on (other than presumably the general effort to avoid scrutiny).
That seems strange.
Some luxury brands intentionally limit production of popular items and only sell them to their best customers. Since everyone wants the limited things, they buy lots of the lower tier, unlimited stuff to become a VIP customer and get offered a slot to buy a limited item. Ferrari is famous for limiting sales of their highest end cars to certain clients. High end hand bag producers limit sales of their most popular models to approved clients only. High end watches are similar as well.
If you can't afford all the extra stuff you had to buy along the way, you can try to resell it and get some of the cash back. If you need more cash, you can resell the limited availability items as well, often for a significant profit over the MSRP, even after the middleman's cut.
Fashionphile, The Real Real, Ann's Fabulous Finds, Yugi's Closet are all active companies in this space.
It's just a weird choice IMO.
I certainly have items that I could sell but don't want to deal with the time actually selling it.
This is very important. Due to strong cryptography it's safe to assume the cryptocurrencies can't be moved without the secret key. What happens if the owner of the key dies? My father asked me about this once and I had no answer. Something to really think about.
We currently think of secret keys as expendable. Compromised or lost? Just make a new one. Nobody shares or inherits keys, everyone has their own set. The dead won't be encrypting or signing any messages and there is generally no reason for anyone to retain the ability to impersonate them.
Traditional key discipline relies on the assumption keys are worth nothing. All this goes out the window when these are the keys to assets worth thousands, millions. A new key discipline needs to be developed.
But good luck finding someone you can trust to actually handle the money once they have the key.
Unless, this is what you meant by "split" in which case I agree.
> To unlock the secret via Shamir's secret sharing, a minimum number of shares are needed. This is called the threshold, and is used to denote the minimum number of shares needed to unlock the secret. An adversary who discovers any number of shares less than the threshold will not have any additional information about the secured secret-- this is called perfect secrecy. In this sense, SSS is a generalisation of the one-time pad (which is effectively SSS with a two-share threshold and two shares in total).
[1]: https://pimbook.org/
You can connect to obituary oracle on chainlink and release data to prespecified law firm upon proof of death. Then make sure the law firm validates the death before opening. Wallets and Keys inside. Or secret pass phrases inside.
Yes, ironic that digital currency is being protected by physical bank, but that's really stretching for something to be haha. It's SOP for banks really.
Fiat money is uniquely susceptible to repressive governments in a way that nothing was when people actually thought about countering those in a practical way, and bank transfers are even more so—see today’s news from Canada for an example that’s chilling whether or not you agree with the actual politics in play. That needs to be fixed, I think. It could be fixed by making money more resilient to government intervention or by making governments less likely to make malicious interventions, probably both. These approaches, and even approaches to these approaches, have different implications, so history will have to find the balance, but I’d be loath to just dismiss the former out of hand.
But death is a thing that needs human interpretation, at least for the foreseeable future, and thus those arguments don’t apply here. The current banking and actuarial system isn’t that insane for the most part, for a system that has to operate under the constraint of needing human interpretation. It’s just that I refuse to stop thinking about the extent to which such a constraint is actually present in any particular situation. In strongbox rental, it is. Great! And I say that as someone with an experience of withdrawing the contents of a safe deposit box from a branch of a failing bank, on the day before the doors of said branch were locked and tagged.
(Nothing about a strongbox rental business even needs to be connected with loans or securities in any way, it’s just that banks sort of organically grew both functions. No problem with that, but also no problem with somebody dissatisfied with any aspect of modern macroeconomics having no gripes against safe deposit boxes.)
It’s effectively backloading risk onto the very things claimed to be outmoded and replaceable.
The risk is very low, but it is present.
See: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...
If you haven't shared it with anyone, why would anyone get it?
If you didn't trust anyone with the keys to it while you were alive, why should anyone have it?
Wills and inheritance have been a part of human society since the beginning of civilization, I think it’s more likely we will need to find a way to make new technology adapt to society and not the other way around
In a sense, due to the deflationary nature of most crypto, dying without telling anyone what the key to your wallet is, is equivalent to redistributing all your funds to everyone in a way that is proportional to the amount everybody already owns. So it's kinda regressive, which seems to align well with the current crypto political climate...
Besides, "how do I ensure my wife and/or children get my wealth when I die" is a question humans have been addressing for thousands of years. Only a bitcoiner could be so nihilist to not care.
I feel like the people I know who are most enthusiastic about Bitcoin are the ones who care most about generational wealth and the long-term mindset. There are tons of ways to establish backups for family members (multi signature wallets, time locked wallets.)
... but can't rip me off a second earlier.
What do you mean, what's wrong? Everything is wrong.
If I have children, I absolutely want them to inherit everything I own when I die. I want them to use it all to reach even further than I have and be more successful and richer than I was. This is how wealth is built across generations.
I don't want my money to be forever lost in the unimaginably large cryptographic search space. I certainly don't want my money to go to anyone other than my children, especially the government.
This is the wrong model, technically it causes micro deflation that would be similar to distributing it to everyone weighted by their current amount. The rich get richer-er (in an absolute sense, but not in a proportional sense).
The effect is probably minuscule on a case by case basis, but if it were happening on nation scale it might make a difference.
Surely you wouldn’t think it’s absurd to expect that if someone dies with some extra food, that other people ought to make use of that food, even if they hadn’t made a formal last will.
When a pile of "capital" is destroyed (i.e. a bushel of wheat spoils, or a factory burns to the ground, or the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody are somehow lost forever) then this is a loss to society in general and to the owner of that "capital" in particular. If a pile of "money" is destroyed (i.e. Pablo Escobar burns $2MM in currency, private key to crypto wallet is lost) there is no corresponding loss of real physical "capital". There is simply a reduction in aggregate outstanding claims against the unchanged real physical "capital". So the unaffected holders of the other claims see their purchasing power increase, i.e. they no longer have to outbid the person whose "money" was destroyed, they have now "cut out" the loser from claims against "capital".
Well, at least one of these examples is actually capital (the factory). Of the remainder, one is just plain property, not a capital good, and the other is information. Capital is property which serves as a means of production. Sometimes the term is used loosely to include highly marketable goods (money) which can stand in for the means of production (e.g. "raising capital"), or even more loosely as in "human capital" (referring to the capacity for labor as a means of production), but it does not include commodities consumed in the production process, such as the wheat; nor information, which is non-rivalrous and thus not property, much less capital.
With that said, you're basically correct about the difference between currency other forms of property—goods with utility beyond their use in trade. For the most part there is no advantage to society in having a larger or smaller amount of currency (in aggregate). For economic calculation it's best if the supply just remains constant; any variation will temporarily affect the allocation of other resources, but eventually the value of the currency will adjust so that the total purchasing power of the currency equals all the goods available for purchase. It can cause problems if the supply changes too rapidly, making prices unstable, or if so much currency is lost that it starts to impact divisibility. For example, if bitcoins grew in value to the point where one satoshi was worth a month of labor we would need to modify the protocol to add more significant digits, or introduce a parallel system for day-to-day transactions, much like silver vs. gold.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadriga_Fintech_Solutions
I recall reading at one point about future support for time locked multisig in Bitcoin that could maybe help with that but don't know the status of that capability or how it works, or how difficult it is to set up.
Seeing the challenge in this, I made a note for my wife which is "All of our nerd stuff, if I die" It contains instructions on how our network works, how to handle domain names, how our backup system works, etc. Passwords and such belong to our shared BitWarden, but for all the other "What now?" stuff, I feel better having given her at least some explanation.
One option would be to create a multi-signature wallet, where for example three keys exist, while two keys are needed for transactions. This would allow scenarios where the widow and the notary can access a wallet after the owner died. At the same time, no single party would be able to run with the money with only one key.
Cotten was treating all customer deposits as ostensibly a single asset pool, paying expenses and customer withdrawals out of the same pot, using that same pot to speculate on bitcoin on external exchanges, and using fake accounts to boost volume or liquidity. When Bitcoin crashed in 2017 he had way more BTC and way less CAD than his customers were owed and had paid much more for it than he could sell it for. It was a classic Ponzi scheme. Add in all of the money he had spent on personal assets out of the same pot and there is no need to speculate about a mythical missing wallet. They found 4 paper cold wallets and all of them were empty, presumably because the contents had been sold to pay other customers.
Just to add to this, we haven't even scratched the surface of what's possible with shared/collaborative custody and timelocks.
Look up “unclaimed property”, there is a whole complicated bureaucracy dedicated to tracking this stuff and letting heirs claim it. Each state of the US has a separate web site where you can search for anything left in a dead relative’s accounts.
Claiming it is easy for small values. It gets more complicated as the value rises, I have enough left in this situation from a grandparent that I am putting off getting something called a “judgement of possession” to acquire some funds.
This bureaucracy does not, of course, exist for cryptobucks; creating one probably will be mandatory if it is to become an actual part of the financial system instead of a cascading pile of scams, and it will involve a whole lot of things that are anathema to the anti-government attitudes a lot of crypto true believers have.
The short answer is inheritance happens. If there's no co-signers, named beneficiaries, will or heirs, the state will eventually appoint an executor who will settle any outstanding debts of the estate against the account, and then I think the state itself is the ultimate inheritor.
Most states have a notion of "unclaimed funds", and you can check to see if you have any money sitting in the state coffers from a dead relative or a settlement.
My favorite conceptually is a dead-man switch. For example, something will have a password only you have, as long as you input you are alive every x days. If you die, eventually it switches to another password someone else might have.
It really is amazing to think how hard it is to keep something safe, once you are tasked with it.
(i'm sure there are many many others, please add yours as a reply!)
the contract could be written such that if two or more checkins in a row are missed, then the assets can be withdrawn by any authorized users.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50751899
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/the-strange-tale-of-...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadriga_Fintech_Solutions
It kinda surprised me.
See https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/vit14.pdf for comparative numbers for 2012 and 2014.
>According to document sellers, it is impossible to fake a working biometric chip, but at many border crossings officials checking passports simply ignore those that don’t work, waving the passport holder through.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/31/revealed-how-f...
As an total outsider I’m accustomed to the cryptocurrency echobubble blaring like a sackful of unhinged hyenas, but the apoplectic conspiracy-mongerong on display seems off the scale.
Scammers all around
Death due to Crohns related whatever at that age is extremely rare, especially when they mention he was otherwise young and healthy (if I misread or am misremembering about the otherwise healthy part, correct me)
& somebody with that sort of money, that also spends $90k at a La Z Boy to furnish a house, would be 9001% on top of any possible thing that Crohns could do to him.
Guarantee he’s alive & he otherwise would’ve gotten away with it if they went with a story of any other medical condition that can lead to sudden death.
(I realize this may sound insensitive to those with or knowing somebody with Crohns. I have Crohns :P)
It is well accepted that Crohn's disease is associated with a small but real risk of death. Population based reports from Sweden,1,2 Denmark,3 and Italy4 indicate that Crohn's disease patients have a higher mortality rate than expected, although at least one notable exception from the UK demonstrated survival similar to the general population (table 1 1).
As for some other comments - until you’re very old, I think the statistics are that you’re much more likely to die from a surgery that tries to better manage your Crohns than of anything Crohns can cause.
Sometimes the surgeries can go very badly very quickly for no rhyme or reason & lead to bowel rupture which is very not good. Not that this is common - just more common than “dying” of Crohns.
I'm otherwise young-ish and healthy, and didn't know I had Crohn's before this happened, though I've had intermittent digestive issues that I thought "weren't a big deal" through most of my adulthood. I can only imagine someone who already knew they had Crohn's had it worse than myself.
Also, the article says he died from complications from Crohn's.
Sorry, what does that actually mean?
It does sound suspicious, but the idea of someone dying of Crohn's in India doesn't sound as extremely unlikely as you make it sound. Also, medical care in India is well below the standards of what we might be accustomed to in first-world countries.
FWIW, I believe it's more likely that something else happened (poison/assassination, or faking his death, or suicide) based on the information I've seen, but I think a sudden, unexpected death due to complications from Crohn's is certainly a possibility as well
There are other things that seem weird about this, but, the furniture store pricing wasn't one of them.
(just offering one possible answer to this question - I don't know any facts about this case)
I guess my main reason for believing it is that I can think of many more plausible sudden death explanations. Drug overdose, accident, aneurism, heart defect, these can all kill without warning. So why come up with a cover story that isn't plausible?
The old "I'm not insensitive about X because I can claim to have X in an anonymous forum" defense, deployed preemptively at that.
If I were going to LARP on HN, I’d find something much more fun to LARP about. I only really mentioned it because after writing things out I definitely saw how it might look like I’m trying to be a dick commenting on things I’d presumably not know much about.
My point was that disclaimers to the effect of "no offense but" are almost always useless, no matter how qualified[1]. Familiarity with the plight of another doesn't make insensitivity about it impossible. Whether you actually have Crohn's or not is a moot point in the face of this.
1 - the sheer preponderance of such disclaimers sometimes makes me wonder if there actually are such linguistic "get out of jail free" cards and I'm the only one who doesn't have the common sense to understand it.
It seems like for the "mastermind theory", the last thing one would ever want to do is bring someone into the fold who would stay behind and knowingly shoulder all the legal trouble. And from her perspective, getting married and being named executor would be a terrible idea drastically increasing her involvement - an unmarried "girlfriend" could passively walk away while the legal system did its thing.
If this was an exit scam, it seems highly likely that Robertson was an unwitting patsy. Granted, encouraging this conclusion is a large part of why she'd write a book. But I just don't see how the alternative would make sense in the slightest.
I get the sense from the various posts and book excerpts and her podcast appearance that she isn't the sharpest tool in the shed nor a criminal mastermind, so to speak.
Also, I find it quite disingenuous for close relatives to claim ignorance when rackets like this fall apart (like Madoff's wife purported innocence). I don't think anyone in the world knows you better than your husband/wife, not even your parents/kids.
It also contains all my estate documents, like a will and other things. I have emailed my family and told them the location of the safe. The fire safe also contains original paper documents like deeds and birth certificates.
e.g. have a 3 of 5 key that can decrypt this document with all of your personal secrets. 1 key for yourself, 2 with loosely connected family members, and 2 with different attorneys that have legal obligations to only use the key on your verified death and as specified by your cleartext will.
This kind of scheme would be highly resistant to failure, since if any one key gets lost, you can discard and regenerate the ciphertext with new keys, and possibly change the secret information (e.g. passwords) if you're worried about future compromise. It's also highly resistant to collusion since it would require a malicious family member or attorney to collude with at two other parties against your will in order to compromise your secrets, all while not knowing exactly of what value those secrets are.
Why not just provide the password for your manager? Isn't that the whole point?
Perhaps even better: only have a cryptographic key on the cloud, the data is duplicated and stored encrypted with family?
>They acquired property, bought yachts and planes, travelled to exotic destinations.
>Robertson, online posters insisted, was conspiring with Cotten, who’d faked his own death and was hiding in some extradition-free backwater until they could rendezvous and live happily ever after.
Seems like they already lived the good life, why fake your own death which only complicates things more.
If they catch you, you'll lose all the money and get sent to jail.
If you fake your death, you can keep all the cash you haven't spent, and avoid jail.
Why do you want to know? I know a doctor in India who can help arrange that if you need this kind of service. He's not cheap though. /s
Anyone here following the drama with Wonderland where a cofounder of was doxxed as a QuadrigaCX cofounder when the team applied for an exchange listing and did KYC?
Nobody is ever going to doxx again at this rate.
The idea that we could replace Ernst & Young (for example) in this saga with math is pretty clearly wrong, since they were needed even though this already was cryptocurrency.
So if you replace banks, courts, auditors, and all this "old money" with math, but you still need the banks, courts, auditors, and all the "old money" companies, what was the point?
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Widow-Betrayal-Missing-Millio...
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/quadriga-widow-je...
If the courts don't know about the crypto that's another thing, but that's just the same as moving your money into an offshore account and not telling anyone. It's physically possible, but isn't legal as a way to get out of paying what you owe.
I'm a little surprised (or not) at the naivete of the cryptocurrency community "It's digital" "It's anonymous" "It can't be seized or controlled by the government". Sure, as though these extremely experienced professionals and very powerful institutions are going to read a tweet from one of the crypto maxis and just throw their hands up and say "It's on the internet, I guess there's nothing we can do about it".
These groups are very, very good at what they do. They've seen it all and even if it's XMR (or whatever) with the proper motivation they will find it (and you). Very, very few people and organizations have the full skill set required to evade these authorities.
I read the indictment. They were arrested and charged. We'll see how the defense plays out but from a read of the indictment they made plenty of mistakes and will (likely) end up going to prison given the conviction/plea rate of federal prosecutors.
Once convicted a federal judge can order them to give up the monero (as I said in my original comment). On top of their time in sentencing for the original crime they can be held indefinitely until they comply with the court order.
In the end they'll go to prison and the government will squeeze them for whatever they can get.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/13/technology/divorce-bitcoi...
> Cotten's will was signed 27 November 2018, twelve days before he allegedly died. It left Robertson the entire C$9.6-million estate and named her as the trustee.
Yeah, that seems slightly fishy.
> A C$100,000 trust fund will provide lifelong care for Cotten's two chihuahuas in case of Robertson's death.
That's heart-warming.
Updating your will before a big trip to the other side of the world just seems responsible. No idea what he was doing in India, or what part he was visiting, but it could certainly be considered dangerous and sounds like a smart trigger/opportunity to update your estate docs. Everything else this guy was involved with might seem fishy, but this does not
> Yeah, that seems slightly fishy.
Updating your will right after a major life event (getting married) isn't particularly strange.
>That's heart-warming.
Chihuahuas are the least heart-warming dogs I can think of.
Users deposited cash and crypto assets with the exchange in order to trade. Gerald sold some of the users' crypto to buy nice things for himself. This was theft. When the price of bitcoin went up, the dollar value of the crypto he owed to users went up, and he could no longer cover it. He may have only stolen $10 million or so, but he ended up owing $100s of millions.
But could it be possible that there exist other unknown cold wallets with a lot of value with lost passwords?
Has been marked safe from...
Rich people problems.
Why is this a story?
It's seems the problem in the article doesn't apply to most people, even in this community. Nor is it new.