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Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone
- LeonM 8y agoMy take on this is that they probably were insolvent for a long time already due to previous hacks/theft. The CEO just decided to lie about the supposedly 137M in funds 'safely' stored on his laptop. This is also what happened at MtGox, except that at MtGox they 'lost' wel over a million BTC. Edit: relevant listening: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/9/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/9/
- chx 8y ago> at MtGox they 'lost' wel over a million BTC. The initial report was 850 000 lost BTC which later was brought down to 650 000. Scroll to the end of https://www.mtgox.com/img/pdf/20140320-btc-announce.pdf https://www.mtgox.com/img/pdf/20140320-btc-announce.pdf
- LeonM 8y agoBefore/after the 850k/650k hack there were numerous other hacks, the total number of stolen BTC is still not clear, new proof of other hacks is still being discovered. Apparently Karpeles also found a 'forgotten' wallet of 200k BTC, which he still seems to own. It's a mess.
- tinco 8y agoNo, the found wallet is under the control of the trustee overseeing the bankruptcy of MtGox. We know this for certain because he sold 35,000BTC when BTC was around 10,000USD, ensuring the creditors will get their full investment back. Doesn't make us whole of course, but it is nice.
- 1stcity3rdcoast 8y agoI lost some 2010 BTC (trading at ~$30) in the MtGox failure, and then missed the window to make a claim. Harsh.
- eggsome 8y agoBut it was trading at around $600 during the MtGox meltdown. Are you thinking of the first MtGox crash (June 2011) that they recovered from?
- tinco 8y agoI think he means he bought them when they where $30, so he would have made some nice gains.
- 1stcity3rdcoast 8y agoTinco is correct, I bought before the MtGox crash at around $30 but used them as my exchange to do the trade, and never pulled them into a wallet.
- tinco 8y agoDid you miss the second claim window as well? We got the trustee to change the bankruptcy format, and it reopened the claim window until I think November. Did you not get any emails about the claims?
- 1stcity3rdcoast 8y agoEverything I used to buy the BTC was anonymized (cash deposit, throwaway email address). I have all my MtGox login information but can't access the email address I used to verify anything. Any way I can still file a claim?
- tinco 8y agoI think you're too late, but you can make an account here and ask: forum.mtgoxlegal.com It's a forum organized by creditors who together pay for a lawyer and an activist to represent us in the bankruptcy.
- tim333 8y agoKraken had like a two hour podcast coming to much the same conclusion as the most probable explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB0OQae4fWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB0OQae4fWo It seems the problems may have started with a software screw up, leaving the "0x" off the ether address. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6ettq5/statement_on_quadrigacx_ether_contract_error/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6ettq5/statement_... which lost them I think 67,317 ETH permanently. Ah the wonders of cryptocurrency. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6er78h/warning_do_not_use_safeconditionalhftransfer_or/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6er78h/warning_do...
- Scoundreller 8y agoI’m a bit sympathetic to their loss. They were supposed to use 0x notation for a particular hex value, but the software always worked without it. Then some tiny x.x.1 patch upgrade changed the functionality, now requiring the 0x, without documenting the change.
- tim333 8y agoIt's scary that with crypto such things can make it so hard to get your money back. I know there was talk of fixing it with a fork to the Ethereum chain one day. Not sure what happened there.
- Scoundreller 8y agoThey did that once. I guess this exchange didn’t have enough pull to change the whole “code is law” principle.
- HenryBemis 8y agoAnd this is the problem. These guys are not regulated. There is no transparency. There are no external auditors. There is no control. When we find out, it is always too late. Every "cryptocurrency bank" is a potential Enron. I fear both the involvement of Central Banks and at the same time the lack of it. If EY (or anyone else serious about this) 'follows the money' then that would be a very interesting report to read.
- this_user 8y ago> These guys are not regulated. There is no transparency. There are no external auditors. There is no control. 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.
- icebraining 8y agoConsidering 2008, what's the point of those lessons? Might as well save a few tax dollars on "regulators".
- blibble 8y agohow many depositors lost money in the financial crisis?
- easymodex 8y agoProbably an order of magnitude more than whole crypto-sphere combined. People just think if they didn't lose anything it wasn't that bad.
- poooogles 8y agoIn the UK and Netherlands plenty due to icesave AFAIK [1]. I'm not sure if deposits over the protected amount were ever paid back. //edit - looks like they were by the UK and NL governments. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icesave_dispute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icesave_dispute
- tyingq 8y agoInsolvent sounds right, but wouldn't you have, say $10M or so, reserved for the getaway? Once it's that low, the jig is up, so you may as well abscond with the last bit.
- valtism 8y agoDarknet Diaries is such a good podcast. I've been working through it recently and this is the next episode I'm up to. Can't wait.
- joe_the_user 8y agoYes, insolvent meaning owned more than their cash on hand. That didn't mean there wasn't some funds left over. But when someone is the position where they've taken someone's money and only have some left, leaving with the rest inherently looks better than staying and being broke and guilty. Adds an extra nuance to "wake up, time to die"
- bifrost 8y agoWow! Do we know if this was some sort of scam or what? Thats... just wow....
- smt88 8y agoWe don't know, but people have been speculating that the death was faked in order to get away with theft and mismanagement of Quadriga wallets. Every new detail seems to suggest a scam and fake death.
- dragonwriter 8y agoThe scam conclusion is stronger than, and does not rely on, the fake death one. The combination does seem to be the most likely, but even if he's really dead, this still looks like a scam.
- endofcapital 8y agoThe odds of it not being a scam is pretty tiny number. Not scientific notation small, but getting there.
- uberman 8y agoFor some reason this sounds like the plot of a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. CEO of Crypto Company... 1) Takes time off to build orphanage in region noted for fake deaths. 2) Subsequently dies unexpectedly. 3) Is immediately cremated. 4) Wife waits a month before saying "oh by the way he is dead" 5) Wife claims all keys on encrypted laptop 6) World watches as wallets mysteriously empty 7) Experts crack laptop 8) All wallets turn up in fact empty 9) $140 million disappears into the ether https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DOjLuy7VoAATprU.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DOjLuy7VoAATprU.jpg
- rchaud 8y agoDiCaprio? This whole affair has been at best a Weekend at Bernie's-level plot. The accounts were emptied 8 months before the death, and yet QCX pretended they were solvent the whole time so they could keep the party going.
- stuntkite 8y agoIn the sequel his ghost solves blocks when you play a latin rhythm and two young/broke computer enthusiasts who moved to Puerto Rico to make it big are the only ones who can see him because they smoked weed that grew in soil mixed with his ashes.
- jjoonathan 8y agoThey should make that one first, because unlike the documentary I'd actually pay to see it.
- CosmicShadow 8y agoHarold & Kumar go Crypto
- subcosmos 8y agoBuy FyreCoin
- dtx1 8y agoHow did they crack the Laptop? Just Bruteforcing a bad password or 0Day-ing the Encryption?
- omouse 8y agoI think this is the $137 million dollar question.
- emilsedgh 8y agoSo they thought. Turns out it was worth nothing.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago>>I think this is the $137 million dollar question. Minus the laundering fees...let's be fair ;)
- Ascetik 8y agoBased on what I've read, the NSA and other white-hat organizations have access to 0-days or have discovered 0-days that can crack these things but they're not released to the public or if they are, they're released years later.
- msherry 8y agoTFA says that Ernst and Young was the company to crack the laptop. Ernst and Young would not burn a zero-day exploit on an auditing job.
- bootloop 8y agoApplying a zero-day exploit without making it public doesn't burn anything. After all, no one knows how they did it.
- solarkraft 8y agoBut would they even risk raising suspicion?
- a_bouncing_bean 8y agoMaybe I don't know much about bitcoin, but can't you track the address where the bitcoins were being transferred to? Seems like it would be difficult to launder that volume of bitcoin all anonymously where it can be tracked, to a certain extent, through the public blockchain?
- omouse 8y agoThere are bitcoin tumblers, essentially the idea is to split up the transaction into multiple transactions of varying sizes to various addresses and to keep doing that in such a way that it doesn't look weird... Basically they try to hide the transaction among the huge volume of transactions going on, kinda like a VPN or Tor?
- stingraycharles 8y agoIt’s important to note that it’s not just splitting up your own transactions, it’s that it’s actually other people’s coins that end up in your destination wallets. As such, it becomes very difficult to trace: techniques for doing this are similar to large scale deanonimization of Tor traffic, and involve large scale pattern analysis.
- dumbfounder 8y agoSo make public the addresses, give out a reward for proof of destination, and then let the cryptohacker community get after it. Kraken is offering $100k, we just need the addresses.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> It’s important to note that it’s not just splitting up your own transactions, it’s that it’s actually other people’s coins that end up in your destination wallets. As such, it becomes very difficult to trace 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...)
- reilly3000 8y agoShouldn’t there be a ledger somewhere of transactions tied to those coins?
- cwmma 8y agoLike maybe a distributed ledger of some sort?
- hmhrex 8y agoThat is publicly available for everyone to read?
- TecoAndJix 8y agoThat points to a tumble service address where it disappears forever in Monero land?
- Scoundreller 8y agoOr just different coins out than went in. Rumour has it the exchange did this anyway as it was short/long on different coins. They lost a ton of ether in the past, so they may have had to do such switcheroos for a while.
- rchaud 8y ago> The investigators said they found other issues too, such as that Quadriga kept "limited books and records" and never reported its financials. New SaaS idea: Skin Lotus 1-2-3 and sell it as a "decentralized on-premise bookkeeping solution for your blockchain"
- wavefunction 8y agoBlockchains are already a decentralized ledger and it's a bit more than just a re-skin given eventual but not necessarily immediate consistency. Presumably the missing books, records and financials consisted of the more mundane sort that regular Lotus 1-2-3 could have helped these embezzlers, were they not embezzlers.
- stendinatorr 8y ago>decentralized >on-site you made my day
- rchaud 8y agoI should have added "serverless" as well, come to think of it!
- whoisjuan 8y agoThis guy is alive (or dead, but not due to Crohn's Disease complications, as stated initially). This is not a conspiracy theory anymore. It's clear there's a massive fraud behind all these events.
- covercash 8y agoAs a mod for r/CrohnsDisease, it really sucks that this is how most people are first hearing about the disease. Those with IBD already have a difficult time with people not believing they’re sick or that symptoms aren’t that bad since they’re not visible. Now Crohn’s will be associated with this fool using it as an excuse to steal a bunch of money... such a huge disappointment.
- koolba 8y agoFor rare diseases there is no such thing as bad publicity. This might even lead to someone with IBD being curious enough to get checked out.
- sorenn111 8y agoIt's not that rare, especially when viewed as a subtype of overall IBD. All in all Autoimmune diseases affect between 20 and 50 million people in the US alone
- patrickmcnamara 8y agoI really doubt that this is how most people are first hearing of Crohn's disease.
- covercash 8y agoMost people think it’s just a stomach ache or diarrhea. They don’t realize how severe and debilitating it can actually be because most people who have it don’t like to broadcast to the world that they’re shitting blood and mucus 30x a day.
- 8y ago
- markjenkinswpg 8y agoI'm not convinced of the first half of the headline re laptop cracking. The article cites the latest monitor report, but the only paragraph I can find with the word laptop just implies the monitor has possession and success with some devices. """ As noted in the First Report, known devices of Mr. Gerry Cotten have been secured by the Monitor including, Mr. Cotten’s laptops, cellphones, USB keys and home computer. The Monitor understands that prior to the commencement of the CCAA Proceedings, the Applicants together with their initial outside expert, attempted to access the devices and were successful in respect of certain devices. The Monitor will work with the Applicants and Representative Counsel to determine next steps to access any information and data which may be located on the devices and report back to the Court with respect to those efforts. """
- Scoundreller 8y agoIt may not matter much. There’s no evidence that a cold wallet with much of anything even exists. But the devices may hold some records of external accounts (eg: deposits on other exchanges).
- tim333 8y agor/Bitcoin basically agrees with you and thinks it's clickbait: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ay34gc/experts_finally_cracked_the_laptop_of_the_crypto/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ay34gc/experts_fin...
- entity345 8y agoBanks and actual currencies still have a bright future.
- Scoundreller 8y agoOh, there’s lots of missing fiat in this case too. Not just crypto.
- quickthrower2 8y agoValue has a bright future. There will always need to be some means of exchanging it. Fiat currencies fit the current system of a bunch of countries defending their territory and needing to collect taxes.
- xenospn 8y agoAs far as I'm concerned, if you give your money to some dude on the internet with ZERO oversight or regulation, you're pretty much guaranteed something like this happening at some point. how is this different than giving cash to your cousin's uncle who promises to give it back "whenever you need it"?
- jacquesm 8y agoI think it might pay off to spread the mugshot of this character far and wide. There is a non zero chance that he's not dead at all.
- vkou 8y agoYes, to make it easier for vigilante justice to find, and kill someone some unlucky sap who looks like Gerald.
- alexanderdmitri 8y agoDoes this happen frequently?
- jacquesm 8y agoI think you're jumping to conclusions a bit.
- pureliquidhw 8y agoSurely plastic surgery and contacts are cheaper than $137MM. I'd guess a new identity with valid (enough) passport is less than $137MM as well!
- samfisher83 8y agoPeople might complain about banks, but when you have cases of fraud at least you have people try to recover it. Government makes you keep pretty good records. In this case how do you undo the blockchain? In this case what recourse do you have.
- blancheneige 8y agoblockchain != exchanges holding your private keys
- samfisher83 8y agoMy point is even if someone has your password there are legal routes where you can go recover your money. The bank will then do that. The blockchain is distributed. Who do you go complain to?
- glitch003 8y agoThat's the whole point of the blockchain. Your money is sovereign. There is nobody to call when it gets stolen, but this also means that no government or bank or agency can take your money or prevent you from being paid (see Visa/Mastercard vs Wikileaks etc)
- zaphirplane 8y agoNot true, an entity with control of >50% of the pool can. I thought such a pool exists
- drexlspivey 8y agoEven with 100% of hashpower you can't steal anyone's money
- mrosett 8y agoYou can just threaten to reverse any transaction they ever make.
- deepspace 8y agoWhy is nobody talking about the convicted felon, Omar Dhanani aka Michael Patryn, who is a co-founder and majority shareholder of Quadriga? Dhanani is very much alive, and is known to have been involved in money laundering schemes. If I were an investigator in this case, that is the first door I would go knocking at.
- Scoundreller 8y agoHere you go: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-quadriga-co-founder-served-time-in-us-for-role-in-identity-theft/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-quadriga-co... But believed to be a minority shareholder, not majority.
- dbg31415 8y agoSuper obnoxious paywall. You can grab the content by doing a quick Apple+A, Apple+C. https://pastebin.com/572stP0A https://pastebin.com/572stP0A
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoNot only that but Michael Patryn turned out to be MikeXBT a known frequent poster on /r/bitcoinmarkets often bragging about and showing proof of his big market moving trades on Bitmex...likely with QuadrigaCX customers' money. It's like something from a movie.
- csomar 8y agoWhat the hell?! Where did you get that info from?
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agohttps://www.theblockcrypto.com/2019/03/07/quadrigacx-co-founder-michael-patryn-allegedly-traded-large-positions-on-bitmex/ https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2019/03/07/quadrigacx-co-foun... Many places
- 8y ago
- Animats 8y agoOne real problem with cryptocurrencies: the information you need to determine that someone has the key to a blockchain address gives you the power to withdraw funds from that address. You can't just demand that a third party auditor have copies of all the keys. (Yeah, dual-sig, split keys, etc. Theoretically possible, not done in practice much.)
- glitch003 8y agoFalse. See cryptographic signing. A keyholder can sign a message with a private key, proving they possess the key, without exposing the key itself.
- roywiggins 8y agoThere are actually whole cryptographic schemes people have written to prove you have control over the money you say you do. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7277865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7277865
- Scoundreller 8y agoBut how do you prove how much you owe? If an exchange can prove it controls 10 BTC, great. But what if it owes 20 people 1 BTC each?
- wolco 8y agoThat would be 20 coins - 10 they don't have. On an exchange you have no proof.
- roywiggins 8y agoI believe the scheme lets depositors prove that their own coins were included in the liabilities calculation. If some depositors never check, the exchange could steal their funds, but if it was a regular part of using an exchange, it would put a pretty strict limit on how much could be looted before it was noticed.
- xutopia 8y agoThis is BS... the money cannot be "gone"... what do they mean by that? There is a public ledger. We would know and can trace where this money went to. Do they mean the wallet was not on the laptop instead?
- ceejayoz 8y agoIf the keys are lost, the money is for all intents and purposes gone.
- deepsun 8y agoBut you can still track history of any coin existed. If somebody know wallet ids of money before they were stolen, you can trace transactions to see what wallet ids they are in now. If they say "stolen", it means that they found transactions when money were transferred from victim's wallet. And if they know transactions, then they know source and destination wallet ids.
- blotter_paper 8y agoThis is close enough to true for the purposes of this discussion, but in the general case you can only reliably track the flow of funds in aggregate, not the flow of any individual "coin." If addresses A and B send equal amounts of coins to C, C sends all of those coins to D, and D sends half of them to E, you can't really track the coins from A to E or from B to E. The transaction from C to D results in a single output that doesn't distinguish between funds from A and funds from B.
- dd36 8y agoYou track D and E. At scale, there surely are consistent patterns.
- blotter_paper 8y agoYes, but my example was contrived for simplicity, and really D can make a transaction with an arbitrary number of inputs and outputs sent to and from an arbitrary number of addresses belonging to an arbitrary number of users. This is what bitcoin mixers do. Now we have a bunch of inputs coming in, and a bunch of evenly sized outputs coming out (with some unevenly sized ones for change). You can still probabilistically track funds if a user did something like putting coins from D into a big mixing transaction with other users and then sending their mixed coins from address F though I to a single address J that just so happens to have the same balance D started with, and of course there are less contrived situations where patterns of behavior would be evident, but this is all probabilistic and you still aren't really tracking individual coins; discrete coins aren't stored on the blockchain, transactions with input and output balances are. If the missing funds are tracked, and this whole affair was the result of malevolence rather than incompetence, I'd bet they're either sitting in a bunch of tiny accounts that have been cycled through mixers more than once or they're going to be before they're spent (having faked your own death, you could see holding off on the mixer until you've had ample time to cover your trail thus giving the appearance of incompetence rather than malevolence for a while).
- harrumph 8y ago"Why yes, the wallet we found was empty. Totally empty."
- mv4 8y agoBack in 2015 two rogue U.S. Secret Service agents, Shaun Bridges and Carl Mark Force, were caught and sentenced to prison for stealing funds while investigating the first high profile darknet market the Silk Road. Shaun Bridges plead guilty for moving 1,600 bitcoins of seized bitcoins confiscated by federal authorities.
- miguelmota 8y agoIs there a link to the on-chain transaction showing the transfer of the funds?
- Shorel 8y agoAccording to the dates and other information in the article, it is also possible he was hacked and someone else has the money.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoIn that case he could just come out with it. My guess is he lost the money either by trading or through pure technical incompetence that resulted in hardware loss or did something to erase it all on accident. Coming out with this would not excuse him from legal consequences as much as it would he be claimed he was hacked.
- eyezick 8y agoThis article is innaccurate. Here is the tracking by Ernst & Young (court-appointed) providing all the public information about these developments. The latest report on 1 March 2019 mentions nothing about a cracked laptop. https://documentcentre.eycan.com/Pages/Main.aspx?SID=1445 https://documentcentre.eycan.com/Pages/Main.aspx?SID=1445
- gamblor956 8y agoThere's nothing wrong with the article. The March Report merely says they were able to recover the cold storage wallets and discovered they were empty; it doesn't go into how they got access to those wallets since that isn't relevant to the report. Per the company and prior news reporting, those cold storage wallets discussed in the March Report were only stored on the owner's laptop, which was previously inaccessible due to various security mechanisms. (Reports suggested that the laptop was "locked" but did not indicate whether it was boot-locked or locked via the Windows mechanisms.) The fact that they were able to access those wallets means they "cracked" the security measures on that laptop.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mthoms 8y ago>The fact that they were able to access those wallets means they "cracked" the security measures on that laptop Incorrect. Experts were able to trace funds back to the cold storage wallets addresses using analysis. But the private keys have not been located and no, the laptop has not been "cracked".
- eyezick 8y agoYup: "The Monitor has commenced a preliminary review of the transactional activity of the Identified Bitcoin Cold Wallets utilizing public blockchain records. This analysis..."
- aloer 8y agorandomly clicked around there and saw the following about E&Y being ordered to post "a copy of the Order on www.reddit.com/r/quadrigacx" https://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Quadriga%20Fintech%20Solutions%20Corp/English/2.%20Court%20Orders/Quadriga%20Order.pdf https://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Quadriga%20Fin... p.10 i thought it's interesting how a third party, reddit, is used in such an official way. the other two channels to be posted on are E&Ys website and quadriga website
- kdme 8y agoI don't get why people even try to store their cryptos in a cloud-based wallet. Just store it in a USB and put it in a safety deposit box.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoSome have mentioned they were transacting when their deposits withdrawals stopped working. It wasn’t a matter of storage.
- nodesocket 8y agoI am curious to know the OS on the laptop that was cracked. macOS, Linux, Windows? I would be surprised if a highly technically founder was running Windows. Does this indicate there is a known vulnerability in the login process of the OS?
- g45y45 8y agoIf i was to guess, i would guess that it was Bitlocker vuln, CVE-2018-12037, where the bitlocker crypto implementation is left to the junk SSD 'self encrypting' feature which is found to be broken. I have my doubts they cracked Veracrypt, LUKS or filevault2 with operator supplied keys. Or they got the keys from Microsoft/Apple (filevault2 and bitlocker will escrow the keys to the OS vendor in home editions).
- nodesocket 8y agoSo you think they broke the disk encryption not the OS login mechanism?
- curiousjorge 8y agoOkay so I grew up with my Colombian step brother...who lets say was an active participant back in the day (see Narcos), he apparently thinks important people from that trade lost their money (like in Narcos), Let me guess one of two things: 1) If he surfaces, it won't be the law that catches him. 2) He got a deal he couldn't refuse
- stevespang 8y ago"Kraken, another crypto exchange, is offering $100,000 for information on where Quadriga's cash has gone". Wow, this is now a serious crime, worthy of a movie.
- RickJWagner 8y agoWow. I'll be watching for more news on this one. Interesting.
- rkagerer 8y agoThe headline and article are both misleading. EY never reported they cracked the encryption on the laptop or recovered any private keys to the so-called cold wallets. Six empty cold wallet addresses were disclosed by Quadriga, and for the most part they look to have been unused for the last year. EY is investigating some other potential addresses which are also empty. Source: https://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Quadriga%20Fintech%20Solutions%20Corp/English/1.%20Monitor's%20Reports/4.%20Third%20Report%20of%20the%20Monitor/Third%20Report%20of%20the%20Monitor%20dated%20March%201,%202019.pdf https://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Quadriga%20Fin...
- caprese 8y agoWhat. Were. The. Addresses.
- lysp 8y ago1MhgmGaHwLAvvKVyFvy6zy9pRQFXaxwE9M 1JPtxSGoekZfLQeYAWkbhBhkr2VEDADHZB 1ECUQLuioJbFZAQchcZq9pggd4EwcpuANe 1J9Fqc3TicNoy1Y7tgmhQznWrP5AVLXj9R 1HyYMMCdCcHnfjwMW2jE4cv9qVkVDFUzVa 1JZJaDDC44DCKLnezDsbW43Zf8LspCKBYP Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/QuadrigaCX2/comments/aq3r08/a_breakdown_of_qcx_btc_movements_what_we_know_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/QuadrigaCX2/comments/aq3r08/a_break...
- ID1452319 8y agoGiven that blockchain is supposed to be a public ledger, can someone explain why they cannot trace where the coins were transferred to when they were moved out of the cold wallets? In my simple world there must be a way to trace them to their ultimate origins?
- Arnavion 8y agoYou can know where they went from the cold wallet. You can't know for sure where the coins went after that, once they've been mixed with other coins. Laundry / tumbler services exist to do this at scale.
- jypepin 8y agowhat does "mixed with other coins" mean exactly? If I own a wallet, and someone steals coins and "mix" their coins with mine in my wallet, they eventually have to get those coins back right? So I probably know them and can found and interrogated? legit question
- Arnavion 8y agoLet's say there are three BTC addresses in the world, #1 to #3. Let's say address #1 has 1 BTC that you're interested in. 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?
- Angostura 8y agoSo - and thank you for bearing with me on this - individual BTC don't have a unique identifier that allow one to trace its transaction history? I must admit, I always assumed that they were uniquely identifiable.
- Arnavion 8y agoYes. In the first place, BTC are divisible to eight decimal places, so there would be a lot of these IDs if they were to exist. And there's no reason the divisibility can't change in the future, so these IDs would have to be quite complicated. A (non-coinbase) transaction is valid if its inputs equal its outputs, and if its inputs come from the outputs of other transactions, which in turn are valid if their inputs come from other transactions, all the way to one or more coinbase transactions. This is sufficient to demonstrate that the transaction is valid - ie it's using coins that exist instead of creating them from thin air. That is all that the protocol cares about.
- Adreth12 8y agoSeems like it was fraud scam in the first place and there was no money in that wallet.
- DeonPenny 8y agoIs the future still in crypto?
- jamisteven 8y agoCant believe the article makes no mention of the other major piece of this conspiracy which is that Michael Patryn, the co-founder of Quadriga, is actually Omar Dhanani, who was charged with one count of conspiracy to transfer identification documents as part of Shadowcrew.com and did 18 months in jail. IMO he is the real mastermind here, as his criminal record shows he was fully capable of hacking Cotten's accounts and was in close enough proximity to his networks to not raise suspicion.
- HNBRN 8y agocomment_on_crypto_fail = ( author_religion == 'crypto' && author_lost_money == false ) ? 'misstep' : 'regulate_urgently'
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- agentofoblivion 8y agoEveryone is a fraud. “A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that investigators cracked Cotten's laptop and discovered money was missing. In fact, they have possession of his laptop and identified money was missing through public blockchain records.”