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Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

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Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#241

Post by justinclift »

uberman wrote: post #3

For 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)…

Plot twist:

10) The CEO was really an actor... hired by the "wife", who masterminded the whole thing

Alternative plot twist:

10b) Both the CEO and wife are hired actors. The head of the orphanage was the mastermind

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#242

Post by dnautics »

worik wrote: post #233
dnautics wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure. I'd say the banking crisis was catalyzed by the lack of regulation, but it was going to happen anyways. The whole thing was largely a result of political pressure to create incentives for a home ownership society, and, if you go deeper, a result of political pressure fostering a growth-at-all-costs economic system that will periodically hit societal resource and efficiency limits, regulations be damned.

Not really. The GFC was a financial/banking crisis There is nothing in "growth at any cost" style "capitalism" that means banks must all collapse together in a coordinated swan dive, like in 2008. That sort of system will collapse, but not necessarily the banks. There is no law of nature that says we have to use free to fuck anybody capitalism run rampant over all. It is a choice. I think it is time we made a differe…

The current brand of capitalism is not "free to fuck anybody", it's actually worse, it's "target the poor". Neoliberal economists specifically call for stealing from workers:

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi...

> even in the long run, it’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis.

Shorter: we create an economic policy to cheat workers out of the take home value of their earnings to make management easier and post favorable employment metrics for political leaders.

That "growth at all costs" policy, which, by the way is not inherently a free market policy, exists to short shrift the labor class by means of a compounding treadmill that most will fall off.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#243

Post by tinco »

1stcity3rdcoast wrote: post #157
tinco wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, 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.

I lost some 2010 BTC (trading at ~$30) in the MtGox failure, and then missed the window to make a claim. Harsh.

Did 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?

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#244

Post by tinco »

eggsome wrote: post #230
1stcity3rdcoast wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lost some 2010 BTC (trading at ~$30) in the MtGox failure, and then missed the window to make a claim. Harsh.

But it was trading at around $600 during the MtGox meltdown. Are you thinking of the first MtGox crash (June 2011) that they recovered from?

I think he means he bought them when they where $30, so he would have made some nice gains.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#245

Post by csel »

justinclift wrote: post #241
uberman wrote: post #3

For 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)…

Plot twist: 10) The CEO was really an actor... hired by the "wife", who masterminded the whole thing Alternative plot twist: 10b) Both the CEO and wife are hired actors. The head of the orphanage was the mastermind

More plot twist - (taken from cbc article) "Government records also reveal that Robertson (wife of Gerald Cotten) has used three family names.

Deeds for properties she bought in 2016 show she was once known as Jennifer Forgeron. On Dec. 1, 2016, Nova Scotia's Royal Gazette announced she was changing her name from Jennifer Kathleen Margaret Griffith to her current name, Jennifer Kathleen Margaret Robertson."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/quadrigacx-nova-s...

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#246

Post by manigandham »

this_user wrote: post #132
HenryBemis wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And 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 rea…

> 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.

Because blockchain is a slow append/overwrite-only consensus database. It does nothing to provide trust. It's also too mechanical for how humans actual deal with each other.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#247

Post by repomies68 »

HenryBemis wrote: post #125
LeonM wrote: post #48

My 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/

And 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 rea…

Though if crypto funds are stolen from cold storage due to hack ortheft, there is nothing to do, even if you are regulated. When crypto transfer is done, there is no way to reverse it. Regulation might help to enforce best practices to prevent theft, but it wouldn't help to recover funds if theft happens.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#249

Post by naravara »

Solar19 wrote: post #190
HenryBemis wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And 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 rea…

This would seem to be a private problem. If people choose to park their money with a non-transparent, unaudited random crypto startup, that's their decision and their problem. I'm not interested in paying for "regulators" in such cases.

You don’t need to pay regulators, you just need to make people able to sue for damages or charge crypto purveyors with fraud. It’s manifestly clear that the majority of these are just pyramid scams.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#250

Post by wallace_f »

qqqwerty wrote: post #228
908087 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "award" ceremony video is both surreal and ridiculously cringe-inducing at the same time. It wouldn't surprise me if he actually felt like he had "achieved" something when he gave himself that award, either. It was like you were watching his fantasy of what people would say about him if he was a productive member of society instead of a criminal and fraud.

FWIW, this is only marginally worse than your standard 'industry award' in that he had the nerve to give it to himself. Pretty much every industry has a boatload of meaningless awards. It is done largely for marketing and for 'social engineering'[1]. It is cheap (both in cost and tact) but effective. [1] Curries favor with the awardees, creates an 'in group' etc...

Feynman spoke at length on the shallowness of awards.

>epaulets, uniform, position: it has nothing to do with something intrinsic of that person.

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