Bitcoin Forum

Is this for real? Did this guy just fake his death and stole the money?

Or did he spent the money long ago and now they were practicing fractional banking?


This is terrible news. This may be a good opportunity for everyone out there who trusts binance or bitfinex or tether or whatever to just move your funds to your own wallets!!!

Canada is a very serious country, with a very reliable financial system, and it happened there! With its largest exchange!! Imagine what can happen to a chinese exchange.

Well i believe if he does fake his death it would be on major news. I think its real and thats what happen when only one person hold the private key in company and the think we learn its not good for company.

That was already posted it here mate by Baofeng, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5105266.msg49550744#msg49550744

Its sound like weird because even the family of Mr. Cotten(the CEO of Quadriga exchange) didn't show proof that his husband has died.
So, if that's true, why even his wife or family didn't know the private key of the cold storage of their exchange.

Even if he assigns one of his trusted staff to hold the private key, so shady isn't it?

People do a lot of weird things. Remember back then, Binance's Changpeng Zhao, former CTO of Okcoin said the exchange backup private keys were held by CEO Star Xu’s non-technical wife and mother.

The more I read, the more it seems like they had a fractional reserve. This post (https://medium.com/@zeroresearchproof/quadrigacx-chain-analysis-report-pt-1-bitcoin-wallets-19d3a375d389) isn't conclusive, but it definitely points to that. The problem is analyzing cold storage wallets that aren't publicly identified can be much harder than with hot wallets, as one commenter points out (https://medium.com/@belcher/interesting-work-1228078c1ec6).



Is that what happened after Mt Gox went down in 2014? Or after Bitfinex was hacked in 2016 and customers lost ~1/3 of their balances?

People never learn. :-\

Cryptocurrency encryption also has its drawback and it is very serious. On the one hand, you need to keep your secret keys very secure, and on the other, there should be a mechanism for disclosing them to certain individuals in case of our death. However, we will never be ready for our death, and there will always be a loss of cryptocurrency. In this case, the lost $ 250 million in cryptocurrency is a very huge amount.

Real or fake,this is ridiculous.250 million USD worth of crypto funds frosen because of the dead(fake or real,I don't know) of one man,who had all private keys.That's why we need decentralized crypto exchanges ASAP.
Wha't that question "Real or fractional banking?".This has nothing to do with the topic.

Indeed, for this information to be still vague, some people still suspect that this is only a falsehood made for an exit scam from the market. Try to see, someone tried to do an analysis with those wallet

https://twitter.com/tayvano_/status/1092439754849759233 (https://twitter.com/tayvano_/status/1092439754849759233)

Surely the public wallet addresses at least must be known to the team, at least they can tell if it has been moved into a scam account. He probably converted it into monero before he died and then sent it to his family members

Regardless of whether the news of his death was fabricated or not - it does reveal a very important problem that lies with all centralised forms of exchanges, wallets, etc.

I'd say that the a lot of the exchanges don't hold full reserves of what they get from deposits. The reason is simple, they are most likely able to spend this bitcoin elsewhere to finance the development of their own site or invest in things, while paying no interest. Of course, they aren't going to tell the public this, because otherwise people would be rushing to get their funds out.

That's what you should expect to be the case when you do come across any stablecoins, any hosted wallet services, and any exchanges. Don't expect them to have every dollar on each deposit, because they probably will not. And also, even if they do, they have the capacity to suspend your account or freeze your funds at any given time as well, which is why in most cases, a trustless bitcoin wallet should be used for long term storage of funds, not centralised exchanges.

think about how much money they make in fees, though. this isn't like stock trading where e-trade charges you a flat $7 commission per trade. crypto exchanges charge percentage commissions, which are immensely more profitable. high volume exchanges like bitfinex or coinbase are printing money super quickly.

intentionally making themselves insolvent is a really dangerous way to grow a business. they'd be better off selling equity for startup investment. any exchange that's done series A investment rounds or more is basically guaranteed not to be into this shady behavior.

Terribly bad for those who left their money on that exchange. Some investigation says that his death was faked and there's no valid proof that the CEO's death was for real, there's no even certificate to provide that his dead for real.

A new lesson to be told for most of the people who has been using exchanges as their safety vaults. Don't ever keep your bitcoin and other important stuffs on exchanges, as much as possible make sure you hold your funds by holding the private keys.

indeed it becomes very risky if we store it there, as if it is difficult to hold accountable after that. and of course the consumers who are harmed. therefore we have to be more careful to choose exchange and do not keep assets too long

They will surely investigate if $250 million were involved. This should also be a wakeup call to other exchanges to have backup measure for instances like this. When I started working, we had a big safe in our offices and we had two people working on different shifts with keys to that safe.

If something happened with the one person, the other person were simply called from the other shift to open the safe. We also had a third backup key that was stored off-site in a safety deposit box. <If both keys were lost, new keys could be made from this master key>  ;)

This just looks like a unprofessional company, with no vision and disaster recover plans for emergency situations like this.  >:(

Sadly, this shows how much regulations are important, and this ecosystem desperately need it.

An exchange can't simple steal or lose 200 millions dollars because a CEO died. There must be security measures such as the ones you saw in your job. There will be some obligations regarding how privatekeys of someone else's money will be kept. It's somehow sad to think that those measures are necessary.

I don't get it, why does banks and exchanges and companies are saved by the government but not people. If a bank fails to do what it should and owes its customers a lot of money and needs to get bailed out of the situation government helps them out but when a person fails to pay their loan they take his stuff away. How does that makes sense. I know that wasn't the topic but I just hate the fact that Quadriga got saved by the Canadian government with the creditor protection thingy.

Aside from that I doubt he is not dead, he is probably dead, there are much better ways to steal peoples money without faking your death, otherwise someone could see you and notify people, who is going to believe someone who came up with 250 million dollar worth of coin without a big history, only people with that much money is the people who have been in the business world for a long time and unless he fakes his death and impersonate bill gates when he is revived as someone new people will ask where he found the money.

I was actually looking forward to this news about the death of the founder who died and no one in the entire organisation have access to the crypto currencies in his custody. Things like this are what should not be heard in any sane industry and it would continue to ensure that regulators are harsh towards crypto start-ups. I have never seen a bank where one director will die and other directors can access the company's fund or an individual the fund goes to his next of kin after certain verification but unfortunately this is happening in crypto.

Its simply a case of failed system. Whether real or fractional peoples life saving are at stake.

With time and stricter regulations concerning exchanges it will be something of the past. Everything that happens right now will be used by regulators to understand how badly things can go wrong in the crypto world.

We need these events (regardless of how bad they are) to happen in order to improve, and let's be honest, it's better that they happen today rather than somewhere in 2025 with very likely way higher amounts of user funds at stake.

I wish there was a way to make these mistakes without losing money, but that option isn't available. Only when money is lost, people, services and regulators are motivated enough to make sure it doesn't happen again.

https://www.coindesk.com/canada-bitcoin-exchange-leader-market-turmoil


'Cotten, in turn, spoke to Quadriga’s security strengths, noting that the exchange uses multi-signature cold storage to secure bitcoin holdings. Fiat holdings, he continued, are held at unspecified Canadian financial institutions.

“Quadriga takes security seriously, and employs a number of policies and procedures to ensure that both client information and client funds remain completely safe,” he said.'


I'm sure his suggestion to stop multi sigging was thoroughly approved and applauded by his colleagues. He must have supplied Indian certificates stating that in no way whatsoever was he going to 'die' before he instigated it again.

Too many oddities and inconsistencies in this matter. The family does not have access to the key, dubious death. It is possible that he falsified his death to get money.

I read this news today and was certainly a little surprised, but not much. Immediately it is obvious that he did not die. Everything was clearly planned long ago:
1) All coins are on cold media.  ???
2) Only he had the password  ???
3) Sudden death  :-X

Everything is obvious

Not really. But the fractional banking accusations are true. Follow the money trail, we have a transparent ledger for a purpose.
Precise report at https://blog.zerononcense.com/2019/02/04/quadrigacx-chain-analysis-report-pt-1-bitcoin-wallets

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1000/1*8c70LGh8p-TdsQR8-HrMHg.png

Regarding his Death, this might be true or not, who knows. If there is no money left to make a run with he just really might be dead. Fractional banking even opens up a remote possibility of having gotten killed.

Some interesting findings from the article:


It's still only speculation, but it does raise interesting points. The fact that there seems to be no linked cold storage wallet that has ever been active is shady, and increases the chances of them running a fractional reserve since essentially they'd be running a ponzi of taking customer deposits and repaying older withdrawals.

But still, it could just be that the cold wallet has been obscured from public eyes and that QuadrigaCX does have one. But, the chances of them operating on fractional reserve is higher.

When your bitcoin is with a third party, it is the same as if you deposited a sum of money with a bank - they are able to lend it out and do whatever. Except in the bitcoin world there are way less regulations, and exchanges can often become insolvent as a result.

Let's look truth eyes. We are all humans and greed sometimes takes over. And this is not an isolated case, do not consider me, of course, biased, but it may well be that he wanted to be rich and that’s all.

I'm 99 percent sure his death is a hoax.  "hurr durr our ceo died good bye 20,000 bitcoins" lol just no

Bet your ass they are trying to cover this up and all employees that worked for this exchange are using this death as an excuse.

many rumours about its, personally i am not trust this accident.too many people tempted when they looking big cryptocurrency asset in exchanges, even that their own CEO.much people be lier since cryptocurrency price very high.

I really can't fathom as to what happened to Quadriga CEO he might be faking his death for all we all and just trying to hide because he has embezzled huge amount of funds and can't return in back. There's another good thread regarding this issue here, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=984498.0. So let see how it goes because there's a lot of new evidence surfacing everyday.

This seems like another Cryptsy to me, but improved. He may have looked at Big Vern's scheme (the CEO of Cryptsy, which left with all of the money to China I think, I forgot about this story) but he took it to the next level and decided to fake his death, in India of all places. The death certificate points to a pretty rare reason to die, usually people don't die from that.

It's just another reminder to keep your keys safe. We just had cryptopia the other day as well. These things will keep happening forever. It's just not possible to have an active trading account in crypto. You have to do your trading, and move funds to your wallet. Daytrading is impossible, just assume it, or assume the risk of full losses if the CEO "dies" or exchange gets "hacked".

Yes, exactly, this guy really took it to the next level. Now, we are not only concerns about a hack or some inside job, but the death of the exchange CEO itself, lol, what more can you ask for in its crypto verse?

We should have like a repository here of methods on how to be prepare in this such scenarios, but then again, most of the us doesn't do anything to protect our funds in an exchanges, until it's too late.

Based on the analysis done i think the CEO death was fake due to some funds movement from one exchange to another a year ago, also, if this is true then, why not him trust his wife with those private keys before he die?.

LESSON:: Trust any of your family member with your private key in case death visit without any notice, as per one my wife has my private keys

right, at least by leaving the key to the people closest to us, it will benefit our next generation. besides that the market circulation continues and does not decrease, due to the reduced volume

There are many things that does not connect in the case...starting from the Will he wrote just 1 month before his death to his death certificate
Now the latest update from E&Y is they have not found any traces of coldwallet .They only found some coins in hot wallet .
Bittrex has informed RCMP (the Canadaian equivalant of FBI) about some transactions/deposits that came from Quadriga exchange wallets after owner'd death

The city of Jaipur ,in India is famous for agents who can create fake death certificates..can not prove death until his body is recovered and DNA test is confirmed

Cryptsy, Mintpal, some others if we oldbies start to "forgot about this story" how are newcomers supposed to avoid similar traps...
By the way Vern didn't got very far.
Daytrading is doable, still. Usually the shady exchanges pop up early on street rumors. So that's why I am doing monthly forum searches for anything tradeside related, pointing at the small subset that I'm using.
Canadians got fucked because there aren't that many alternatives to be used for their native currency.

yes, the news of Gerald Cotten, quite a stir, many people consider this a game or forgery of death because of his sudden death, but from here we must study in a life of trust that is very expensive in value, and absolute trust is only in ourselves, there is no one we can trust completely. And from here we can conclude the weakness of crypto currency investment is like death, coins can be lost at any time and the worst thing cannot be predicted even for the next second. I am also quite surprised by this news, no matter how sudden his death, there must be a little time for Gerald to tell his wife the key, because it is very important, if everything is dark like this surely the news will develop wildly which raises uncontrolled suspicions

I am surprised that until now the police or some other institution have not said anything about it. Somewhere, I read that a specialist hired to find these passwords stated that there were no such cold wallets (!!!). Sooner or later we'll find out what the truth is, but it looks like we have to wait. It does not change the fact that the situation is really strange and suspicious.

Unearthing the blockchain revealed new discoveries, https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1098656491609849856 which is to their own statement "speculation".
The founding date of Quariga looks interesting, 2013 same year when I got attracted by bitcoin.

Armstrong points at some ETH software trouble in 2017 resulting in lost funds. The accusations of trades using customer funds seem to be unprooven. The still ongoing Bearmarket applied the final death blow, now there I can follow by some glance at my own portfolio. At least, as a privateer, still beein healthy.

Its really makes me curious about these problems, I don't know how the Term & Condition for their asset management. why only one single people holding the key also the company can be using Multi Signature for maintaining their asset right, to spent some fund need around 3-5 people to confirmed the movement of the asset if we got a problem like this.

Thanks for posting, I missed this one. Some interesting speculation from an unlikely source. I think what he's saying sounds very plausible.

I recommend others read the thread too but here are some key posts:

And a cogent reply from Caitlin Long:

We wont really have any choice but to wait up for further updates regarding into this situation either it would be solved or would just remained puzzled about into this incident.
I do keep searching for new updates as the time goes by but i doubt this will really takes time until the people here on crypto would tire out to find the truth.

right, waiting for the latest news to reveal the truth is the best way, after that we can predict what will happen after that, so we can determine our own pace in this business

Seem like many speculation about his death. Some peoples said his death is fake and many believe this theory. The victim always customer that trust their fund on exchanger wallet and some owner just want to take advantages by scamming people fund

will, if there is any new emergence coin whatsoever, because I still have one with blockchain tecnology if it gives it a good thing to everyone and has been a good coin if there is a new one, Im really sure that's the best coin and it is a part of bitcoin cryptocurrency and provides good benefits and hoping to make it profitable for everyone.

I still do not think the death is faked, I mean you can't fake a death that easily when you own that much money in a bank. When you die you die and there is a funeral and there is a corpse, in order to fake your own death there should be no corpse to begin with and no one should have seen you die at all. We just need to know how this person died and where he was buried or burnt and we need to know the reports from the hospitals on how he died and autopsy reports of his death.

Lets face it if there is only 1 person who seen him die and that is his wife then there is a big chance he faked his own death however if there are multiple people who witnessed his death then we can safely say he is really dead and the company was just not ready for something like this.

Let's face it our most prominent banks are likely bancrupt if all lie-abilities ever get uncovered. Some example:

Cum-Ex and "Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler" who've known since 2010 which speaks jailtime to me but of course the big fishies getting filleted ... smallish chance for that. KPMG even dared to ask the EU for tax returns when filing for a bancrupty case in their    receivership.

I doubt he faked his death but there is a question mark over those private keys. I am betting that he passed them on to someone else on his death bed. Sooner or later, those coins are going to move

The guy did fake his own. Most definitely cause he wrote and signed a will just a month before going on a trip to a country in which some one who is sick does not go to unless they are expecting to come down with something and eventually die there.
This is what everybody is questioning with their decision to go there at this time and so close to christmas?
Does not make any sense to do this.
Also his wife who he got married to several months prior received a land in nova scotia and a home in some other place. Also a large boat and a private jet.
So his estate can not sell these assets so to pay the customers atleast part of what they lost?
This also does not make any sense whatsoever.

Large number of opinions were getting circulated around the market relative to this issue. From my view an CEO of an exchange won't get into such an activity., because he knows the difficult faced in gathering user base and supporting common people grow through these cryptocurrencies.

This is crypto sphere buddy and crypto scammer planned different strategy in stealing from innocent people. But moving the btc which happen to be in ex-Quadriga CEO wallet require the authority to do everything to find out what really happen and his time of died will easily explain if he's guilty or not.