The Money Mustache Community
Around the Internet => Antimustachian Wall of Shame and Comedy => Topic started by: RecoveringCarClown on February 03, 2019, 10:22:25 PM
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Yikes.
https://gizmodo.com/crypto-exchange-says-it-cant-repay-190-million-to-clie-1832309454 (https://gizmodo.com/crypto-exchange-says-it-cant-repay-190-million-to-clie-1832309454)
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Just goes to show... if you do buy Crypto, move it into your own wallet ASAP and don't leave it on the exchanges!!
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Has someone tried 1234?
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what happens when all 21 million bitcoins belong to dead people with all passwords lost?
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But do they have the password for their Beanie Babies? I'm Generation X, so I need to know for my own investments.
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Has someone tried 1234?
That's the same combination on my luggage!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JNGI1dI-e8 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JNGI1dI-e8)
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Dude, it’s money, you can’t take it with you!
Hold my beer.
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It’s why my son has it written down and in a safe.
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It’s why my son has it written down and in a safe.
Do you know the combo to the lock? LOL. (sorry, couldn't resist)
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It’s why my son has it written down and in a safe.
Do you know the combo to the lock? LOL. (sorry, couldn't resist)
The good thing about safe's is... they can be cracked* (or drilled into) :)
* Bitcoin wallets could also be cracked, in theory - it turns out just to take a few million years to do so.
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has anyone tried the following passwords?
P@ssword1234 or something similar
C@$H!5K1nG
Booyah!
May also need the seed phrase.
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The good thing about safe's is... they can be cracked* (or drilled into) :)
* Bitcoin wallets could also be cracked, in theory - it turns out just to take a few million years to do so.
A few million years at today's computing power. Going out a few decades, the time needed could be quite manageable. Perhaps if bitcoin is still around in 2060 (that's a big if) it might be worthwhile to start hacking into all the abandoned/lost accounts that are secured with 40+ year old encryption technology.
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Just goes to show... if you do buy Crypto, move it into your own wallet ASAP and don't leave it on the exchanges!!
+1
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I just like to bury gold in my backyard. It's safer.
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I just like to bury gold in my backyard. It's safer.
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Wasn't one of the selling points of Bitcoin (and the hundreds of competing "cryptos") supposed to be that it was "safer" than those old, unreliable dollars?
Yet we constantly see stories of this stuff being lost, stolen, or people losing passwords.
To say nothing of its dubious value as a "currency."
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One of the advantages of a deregulated currency system is that people can get "bit-slapped" quite easily. Here it's a result of a lost password, but there are other circumstances under which people have been defrauded or conned. The banking and currency system have plenty of flaws, however it's harder to actually lose your money and be unable to recover it through no fault of your own. Simply losing your bank account number or password doesn't make your money disappear (although giving it to the wrong person might).
I doubt that cryptocurrency is going to go away anytime soon but I also do not have any immediate plans to invest in it until the market (deregulated as it is) stabilizes somewhat.
People say great things about truly free and unregulated markets, but they do have their risks and down-sides.
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I find this so funny. I prefer to lose fiat currency the old fashioned way - to a masked highwayman who stops my stagecoach.
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You could say a whole bunch of people have been bit-slapped.
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I'm a Canadian. I'm no interested in crypto, but I've been watching this trainwreck. Much of the information is summarized here: https://amycastor.com/2019/02/12/how-the-hell-did-we-get-here-a-timeline-of-quadrigacx-events/
The owner, Gerry Cotten, was incompetent at finances, not filing his corporate taxes or having an accounting system. His widow (whom he only recently married, and has changed her name several times) didn't care about the customers at all. (In the month plus period of time it took her to alert the customers that the owner had died, she sold off his assets, and specifically asked the buyers to keep his death a secret. While there's no proof that she committed fraud, this doesn't look good.) During this period the company still accepted some automated deposits.
The co-founder, "Michael Patryn", was a convicted identity thief who was deported from the US back to Canada. Patryn left the company in 2016, the same year it failed to go public due to a lack of paperwork.
The company would literally mail people cash, and have people pick up or drop off cash at its offices, which is not a mark of a reputable company. Of course people had trouble withdrawing money, because the company essentially became a "bank" (fractional reserves, but with no oversight, no CDIC [FDIC equivalent], and so forth). The owner is said to have put his own money into the exchange to keep it afloat.
The cold wallets are empty, so nobody needs the passwords. Most of the money was moved out in April 2018. The company created 14 fake accounts (filled with fake deposits) and moved the money to a number of other exchanges (I believe 14 of them!). Non-Canadian exchanges will probably not listen to court orders unless they're reputable. Some of these other exchanges... were not.
The company had been in financial trouble since mid 2017 (when they got hacked) and it became obvious in early 2018 (when their "bank accounts" were frozen, only they weren't their bank accounts, and they didn't even have an accounting system). Much of the money was frozen in bank drafts that banks refused to honour; the bankruptcy judge had to issue an order protecting the banks before they would honour these drafts.
This company used to be the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Canada, and was probably the first one to launch here (which is probably the only reason for its previous success). There were no regulations on cryptocurrency here, and I believe many of the investors saw the lack of government oversight as a feature, not a bug. They invested in something with no government oversight and got exactly what they wanted... no government oversight.
Some of the original stories suggested the owner faked his death and was running an exit scam, but this seems more like incompetence than anything else. He would have been better off robbing customers back in 2017, when bitcoin was worth a lot more and he was... alive. Due to the lack of regulation, he could run his company so incompetently and get away with it.
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Related article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/most-bitcoin-trading-faked-by-unregulated-exchanges-study-finds-11553259600
"Nearly 95% of all reported trading in bitcoin is artificially created by unregulated exchanges"
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well, this is the main problem of the cryptocurrencies - it cannot be recovered. Once lost, lost forever
should have never been called "currency" since it can't be used in everyday normal transactions. Can't even buy TP with it at my local supermarket, warehouse club, or convenience store.
It's not even a real thing like a commodity. The earliest "miners" are the whales who hold the bulk of coins and their relatively small trades make a large impact on the "coin market".
Fool's gold.
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You could say a whole bunch of people have been bit-slapped.
I see what you did there.
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well, this is the main problem of the cryptocurrencies - it cannot be recovered. Once lost, lost forever
Interesting first post. Let's resurrect a thread that died out more than a year ago.
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Have they tried using the name of his dog as the password?
That is the first place I would start :)
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The Ontario Securities Commission went into great detail on how customers lost their "money" here: https://www.osc.gov.on.ca/quadrigacxreport/quadriga-launch-continued.html
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well, this is the main problem of the cryptocurrencies - it cannot be recovered. Once lost, lost forever
Interesting first post. Let's resurrect a thread that died out more than a year ago.
Looks like the mods are on it, as there's no comment visible from that name. Pro tip: when someone appears to be a troll, don't use the quote function, because then only the quoter (you) can remove the post. Unless you remove your comment (HINT), that particular troll will live on in infamy...