I'm kinda surprised that police don't get warrants for death threats. Sites like Reddit and Facebook collect lots of data. Even if someone is trying to be anonymous, they can likely connect it to a person. Some people might be able to mask their trail, but the vast majority can't.
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."
Change how you view police. They don't do very much crime prevention. Think of them as the people who come to clean up after the crime already happened.
To add another comment, pro-police commentators should look at clearance rates for crime in their areas. Police are generally very very bad at their jobs! I looked up SFPD clearance rates for the last year -- they solved about 10% of all bulgaries and less than 21% of robberies. 10%!
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?
Keep in mind that you have a very America centric viewpoint. Judging by your mention of CVS Pharmacies at least.
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 think the laypersons definition of solve is getting their stolen things back. That's what i would expect. How much, if at all, jail time or fine or whatever the person gets is between them and the state, i need no revenge
"Solving" a case in real world policing is much more complicated than you seem to think. Many crimes are not reported, solved off-record, or just prevented in the first place. Many are reported with no info to do anything with, and others take magnitudes more resources to solve then is practical.
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.
10% doesn't say much about the value that was recovered. 10% of burglaries could very well be 5% or 90% of total value recovered. Are they disproportionately going after grand thefts or petty thefts?
It could be incompetence, it could be lack of ressources, it could be that it’s just very hard to find the culprits and prove with high certainty they are guilty.
Also, excessive focus on proportions of crimes solved results in the worst sort of policing, where they push clearance rates by trying to pin lots of charges on one weak individual, decline to record minor crimes that probably won't be solved, and boost their overall clearance rates with easy charges for drug possession.
Right, also how does crime prevention make sense? I mean someone is innocent until he commits crime right? So it would mean arresting innocent people because "they were going to commit a crime".
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.
I can't stress how true this is. I've never seen the police solve any crime they were called for. They just show up and shrug.
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.
I was the victim of a home robbery a few years ago in Cleveland. Thieves hit multiple homes on my block in a few hours, TRASHED my house looking for valuables and stole about $1000 worth of stuff from my home (an easily identifiable bike, cash)
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.
Police aren't magic. Your anecdotal experience is unfortunate but it doesn't make them a "worthless institution". Property crime is very minor, and the resources it would take to systematically track down the thieves in your example is far more than the damages caused and would interfere with other investigations in far more serious crimes.
Property crime is not minor, it's what the common people paying taxes actually expect law enforcement to deal with. Like, being able to leave your bike and find it where you left it, you know
People expect law enforcement to deal with everything, especially if it personally affects them.
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.
Cynical view. I called the police for a theft, they found the guy and brought my goods back within 24 hours. I expressed amazement and they said "yeah this is our job we are pretty good at it."
Maybe depends on where you live. GP's experience rings true after living in SF for a decade. I've had a friend get punched in broad daylight by a homeless person, black eye and everything, and the cops responded "what do you want me to do?" Also know many startups with offices broken into, laptops stolen. Cops show up 4 hours later and say they probably won't recover the goods. When asked if camera footage would have helped, the answer is no - but you can stick up some fake ones as a deterrent.
So what do you want them to do? Interview every homeless person to find the culprit? What's the practical solution using reasonable resources?
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.
We could both give a description of the person, location where it happened, and there were many witnesses. Typical stuff cops ask on TV. I'm not face blind to homeless people.
TV isn't anything like real life. Was there photo or video surveillance? If not, how good was the description? Was the perpetrator still near the location? How many people do you need to search to find a match? How many cops and how much time do you expect to be assigned to this?
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.
I am not sure what you are arguing for. We should not have asked a police for help because we should have known that their job is hard to do efficiently and their workplace contains office politics?
That's their problem, not mine. As far as I'm concerned, police should do what they say they do on the tin. What happened was my friend got punched in the face and what we wanted was for the police to at least make it appear like they were interested in reducing the ambient amount of face punchings in their jurisdiction.
I'm arguing against the many comments in this thread that called the police a "worthless institution" because of some anecdotes, which is analogous to saying "sql is slow" because you particular query is slow; instead both subjects require thought about realistic scenarios and expectations to understand why things are the way they are.
> "appear like they were interested"
They're interested but they're not there to appease. As I already said several times before, police need laws and courts to back them up or their work is ineffective. You should contact your maylor and local DA about why that jurisdiction has so many face punchings by the homeless in the first place.
Buddy got his bike stolen. Granted, it was a very nice bike. Cops called 3 months later to say they found it for him. Didn't even arrest the kid riding it, because it was obvious he "inherited" it, and he didn't give them a hassle turning it over. Most of them are pretty good at their jobs. IME, barely most, but most nonetheless.
I got my laptop back after a burglary in Newark. I had to do all the detective work, which was easy enough with Orbicule Undercover, but I did get it back.
Law enforcement definitely oversteps their boundaries a lot, there is misconduct etc., But there is a difference between mass surveillance, laws that force companies to provide access to information while at the same time not being allowed to reveal this has happened, and legitimate requests for information relevant to solving a crime. I had a case in my broader circle of relatives that made me think about if or rather how access to such information should be available to law enforcement, and how that could reliably work internationally.
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.
The police have limited resources and they can’t go after everything.
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’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).
That doesn't change the fact that it's still limited.
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.
And a lot of people here would probably be screaming if you did prosecute some immature 20-something picked at random and tossed them in prison for ten years for an ill-considered social media post.
In many countries the first time offender 20-something would spend a night in jail, be arraigned the next day, and likely enter a diversionary process where they need to face up to what they did. Perhaps a conference with the victim. Do some community service. Etc. 9/10 this will give someone the chance to seriously rethink their behavior.
Just to be clear, I think the clear reading of what is being discussed is "a specific and targeted death threat, either alone or in concert with others", not a hot take that fails to age well.
No one is talking about encouraging such behavior. But if the FBI undertakes a serious investigation to track them down, when they get tracked down, they may well end up in a Federal prison for a long time--especially if they can't afford a few hundred thousand dollars for the best legal support. Maybe they deserve to have their life ruined for probably poorly considered juvenile behavior but I'm not sure. There are societal costs associated with pursuing and prosecuting every crime to the max.
Folks aren't asking for people to be locked up forever for this. A comment in the thread mentioned about first offenders getting no jail time, but needing to publicly apologize, do community service, etc. Repeat offenders should likely serve some jail time, with each offense bringing stronger punishment.
Doing nothing about this does encourage its behavior, especially since there's entire communities around doing it (kiwi farms being one of the worst).
> It's weird because they seem like the type of thing you'd want to ban for SPAM/harrassment.
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.
The nuance this misses is scale. FB wouldn't just need to block people who are reported, they would need to have a team to manually investigate all claims. Otherwise it's just another tool in the harassers' arsenal.
Their automated systems (which exist) haven't caught this, or they wouldve been disabled already. Alternatively, the number of people needed to investigate every reported account is absolutely massive.
And yet, some stuff does get blocked, and even manages to get blocked routinely or on a hair trigger. I thereby stand 100% by what I said and whatever moral implications might be inferred... but can now add that those same decisions / priorities--during the time when you were part of that exact team, though accepting some generous room to quibble if you explicitly quit in protest or spent your time on the inside fighting for some kind of change (and with maybe a narrow exemption for "I really really needed the money", as I get that some people are stuck)--also show your true colors (which you likely, or course, already realize, but I think should always be explicitly stated).
>I'm kinda surprised that police don't get warrants for death threats.
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.
You're right, but your comment got me thinking. Police don't investigate online threats because there's nothing for them to gain, but that is not a given. Like if you were some prolific web personality, wouldn't you want to move somewhere you could report threatening comments to the local police, have them issue requests for information, track who is making repeated nasty comments etc? Either through higher taxes, direct user fees for police investigation, quid pro quo, etc.
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.
My brother who has an intellectual disability recently called the police because he was being prolifically harassed on instagram. Being sent stuff with death threats / necrophilia etc. The cop had to explain to him that they cant do anything about it and that he is worried for his daughter who is online as well.
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.
Well put, and as you say theres a tradeoff somewhere in what they can pay attention to. I dont deny that and i also dont really know how they "should" be handling things. Its just pretty bizarre when you and your friends have no expectation of privacy, the police have palantir, and the munitions are for defending nazis.
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.
I’ve always believed that situations like that happen because Facebook would rather be able to keep an eye on those people than send them to somewhere they can’t.
Maybe the government is trying to discourage awareness or curiosity into their own back doors, trojan horses, and spyware in every computer and phone. Powerful legislation in that direction may open doors that the government would remain to keep closed.
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.
It seems like withdrawals were in cash: "Quadriga used an unusual teller-window system for customers to withdraw their money. Rather than pay customers via bank wires, they were told to come to a nondescript building in Laval, Quebec to pick up the cash."[0]
That's both sort of an explanation - even my local grocery store uses armored cars to transport money to/from a bank, not holding piles of it at home - and more red flags.
It’s important to remember that Quadriga wasn’t able to get banking services in Canada. Canadian banks were refusing to do business with any cryptocurrency-related businesses.
Keeping the cash at home wasn’t a good idea, but being blocked from using traditional solutions necessitated that they build their own.
Something similar happened with cannabis related businesses in the US.
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.
At the beginning one of Quadriga's products was an ATM that people could use to deposit cash and get BTC in return. It's just about plausible that they emptied the ATMs and took the money home occasionally.
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.
When no banks want to work with you, and when you offer a service that can be paid for in cash, it's not surprising that the entrepeneur will end up carrying a lot of cash at any given point in time.
I know some people that used to run a number of those 'private' atms you'd find in gas stations, etc. They regularly drove to the various machines to fill them up with cash, driving an old pickup truck and carrying around 30-50k in 20$ bills in a brown paper bag. Security by obscurity I guess.
From my time in the Bitcoin ATM space, it was difficult to get a bank to accept a large amount of cash from a Bitcoin ATM.
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.
It's undoubtedly completely stupid, that's a given, but if your husband runs a company that deals in large amounts of cash (like one that runs ATMs), then it's plausible that seeing piles of cash on the kitchen counter might not be an immediate red flag.
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).
Just because the money itself was legitimate, doesn't mean something shady wasn't going on. The buyer could have been laundering money, with your friend actively helping him. For his sake, I hope he verified the other person's details and saved them, because if he deposited >$10k cash, it was reported to the government, and he'd be responsible for saying where it came from, and they may not like the answer.
Well for one, in the UK, when you sell a car, the seller fills out a little chit and mails it to the government, who then mail a new title to the buyer. So at least there'd be record of the sale, and an address to start to track where the money came from. In addition I think he thought the bank's security cameras would add critical information about the seller. Not sure what other verification he may have done.
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.
Many people use luxury goods as a medium to transport significant wealth around. You'll get questioned for bringing more than $10.000 in cash in or out of the UK or most of the western world. But you get an expensive watch and it'll likely slip.
> Cotten possessed the only key to the online vaults where his customers’ investments were supposedly stored.
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.
One solution is to have the key on paper in a safe, and then let the lawyer know the key is in the safe. If you die they can drill the safe. The nature of the private key makes digital solutions possible, but they aren't necessary. It doesn't have to be handled differently from any highly valuable small object.
Depending on the amount, split the key across paper across multiple bank vaults and lawyers, with direction to contact all of them and bring the key together at your death.
But good luck finding someone you can trust to actually handle the money once they have the key.
One cool aspect of Shamir's Secret Sharing is you can set any threshold for how many fragments are required to recover the secret. This reduces the risk of one losing the secret due to fragments being lost. The scheme also has perfect secrecy, so gaining a few fragments, but not the threshold amount, gives an attacker no information about the secret.
I wouldn't split the key because as another comment noted, you don't need all the pieces to brute-force the rest. Rather I would have several "keys" that when you XOR them all together, you get the real key. That way, any piece is useless without all the rest.
Unless, this is what you meant by "split" in which case I agree.
Even just putting half the key on paper and not putting the rest could make brute-forcing the rest feasible. Even knowing just 1 bit makes brute-forcing 2x as easy. 8 bits? 256x easier, etc.
One would use a scheme like Shamir's secret sharing [1], not literally cutting the exact bits of the key into strips.
> 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).
(Shamir’s scheme is delightfully straightforward, but if polynomial interpolation over finite fields isn’t a thing you feel in your bones, try inventing an n-of-n-shares scheme that only uses xor and a random-number generator. Gb nyy ohg bar bs gur cnegvpvcnagf, tvir n puhax bs enaqbz qngn nf ybat nf gur frperg; gb gur ynfg bar, tvir gur kbe bs gur frperg naq gur enaqbz puhaxf. You probably don’t want that in production, but it’s nice to figure it out and even utterly simple to prove it secure, provided you understand the proof for one-time pads.)
This immediately came to mind as a possible tactic because polynomial interpolation is covered nicely in A Programmer's Introduction To Mathematics[1] which I started reading recently. Highly recommended.
Oh yeah, I know about that. I meant to intentionally release only part of the key specifically to make brute-forcing easier for your heirs. I mean, hey, they gotta work for it, you just give them a leg up! :)
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.
This isn't that ironic, as there are often safe deposit boxes with contents more valuable than the cash on hand of the bank branch itself.
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.
I was more referring to the (somewhat fair) crusade against big banks in the crypto community in general. Tweeting against banks all day and talking about "code is law" while paying a safe deposit box fee and leaning on the traditional legal system (wills, etc) and banks (the box) scales somewhere from ironic to hypocritical.
No it doesn’t, at least in a sensible understanding of the crusade. (I’m not sure cryptographic Byzantine consensus is the panacea it is touted to be, but agree with its proponents as to whether many of the things they call problems with the traditional system are in fact problems.) It’s nice to have a technical solution to things that do not actually need human interpretation, and it’s nice to expand the set of these things. Whether you actually want human interpretation for the act of transferring money is questionable.
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.)
I think the parent was pointing out at the irony that every hour of effort spent on the crypto space so far has only made banks and other institutions even more critical in the end, because the death rate will be 100% for the forseeable future, like it always has been.
It’s effectively backloading risk onto the very things claimed to be outmoded and replaceable.
Not ironic at all. It's a fact that banks have great physical security, no reason to not take advantage of that. If you have a cryptocurrency paper wallet in the bank, they don't know about it, it's not on their books, they can't lend it out without your knowledge and inflate the economy with it.
Note that banks usually require you to sign away all liability for anything placed in a safe deposit box, even if negligence or fraud on their part leads to the items being stolen or destroyed.
> 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
Yeah, but inheritance law has changed a lot over the centuries: before the French revolution only the first child (possibly son, I don't recall right now) could inherit, then the revolutionary government made a big deal of splitting properties equally among siblings in order to break up large estates. After WWII most Western countries had very punishing inheritance taxes, and that's been dialed back in the 70s. Some economists (Piketty and co) make a big deal of bringing back high inheritance taxes and using them to finance a universal basic capital to be disbursed at a young age.
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...
Then again maybe this addresses the inheritance tax issue. Instead of debating how much money goes to heirs vs the state, folks net worth could just "evaporate" on death, thereby slightly (presumably) reducing the supply of whatever currency was held at the time of death.
In this case, it wasn't his money! It was the Quadriga customer wallet!
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.
> 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.)
Most people don't trust their adult children with access to their wealth, and yet they leave it as an inheritance to them when they die. Often even accompanied by a will
> What's wrong, if your wealth distilled to the limits of abstraction dies with you?
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.
> If you haven't shared it with anyone, why would anyone get it?
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.
I mean, another way to look at this is that wealth, assuming it’s reasonably liquid, can be exchanged for other goods (that is, after all, the only real point of wealth in the first place).
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.
On the other hand, if money is destroyed and not replaced that then makes everyone else's money more valuable as no one else's wealth (and hence overall wealth) has been affected.
I doubt that’s true in any meaningful sense. You could say the same thing for food: if you make it more scarce at some point you will probably observe an increase in price of existing food. And yet you could have eaten the food instead of destroyed it.
I believe the parent here is making a distinction between "capital" and "money"; "money" being a claim against real physical "capital".
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".
> 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)…
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.
This is why I added "assuming it’s reasonably liquid" to my initial comment. If one's wealth is reasonably liquid, then I don't think it makes much sense to make a distinction between whether it's "capital" or "money." For the vast majority of people, I think this is a reasonable assumption. If you could liquidate the deceased person's estate and exchange it for consumables or capital and donate those to a good cause, is that really worse for society than the nebulous idea of increasing the value of everyone's money by destroying the deceased person's money? I guess I'm having trouble seeing the distinction between "destroying existing capital is bad" and "destroying money that could have been exchanged for capital or used to create capital is good."
> If you could liquidate the deceased person's estate and exchange it for consumables or capital and donate those to a good cause, is that really worse for society than the nebulous idea of increasing the value of everyone's money by destroying the deceased person's money?
That would depend on who gets to decide what counts as "a good cause". I can think of worse ways the purchasing power could be employed than distributing it widely among other users of the currency. Even assuming the best of intentions, you're still directing resources rather arbitrarily away from other goals in favor of the selected cause, which is not necessarily a net benefit to society.
In general it makes sense to follow the wishes of the deceased, if they are known—it serves no good purpose to distinguish between gifts made just before death vs. ones made at the time of death via a will, and doing so penalizes those who die unexpectedly before making their bequests. Beyond that, I see no reason why relatives of the deceased should have an automatic claim in the absence of a will—but their claim is stronger at least than any the state might make, so given the choice I'd rather see the property go to the heirs than the state. Personally, though, in the absence of a will I would just consider the property abandoned and available for anyone to freely use and thus claim for themselves via homesteading. In some cases that process may have already begun—for example, if the owner of a house dies without leaving a will then anyone else who was already living there (presumably the deceased's family) would have priority to assume ownership once the deceased's claim was abandoned. Their prior investment in the home didn't matter as long as it had an owner, but with that owner gone it should count in their favor for the homesteading process.
> That would depend on who gets to decide what counts as "a good cause". I can think of worse ways the purchasing power could be employed than distributing it widely among other users of the currency.
Yes, but the dependency on what counts as a good cause also applies to distributing wealth indiscriminately among all holders of a currency.
It applies to some extent no matter what you do, but with this approach the purchasing power is spread so widely that no one will even notice the difference. Also, destroying the currency or otherwise making it permanently inaccessible when the owner dies is for all practical purposes indistinguishable from the owner living and simply never spending it, so nothing really changes.
Yes, but again you could say the exact same thing about any capital or food the person had when they died, especially if they weren't extremely wealthy. But I thought we had agreed that destroying capital and food is not good. I'm just failing to understand the distinction between destroying a deceased person's capital, and destroying their money.
> I'm just failing to understand the distinction between destroying a deceased person's capital, and destroying their money.
"Capital" is the wrong word here. It doesn't include non-productive, consumable goods such as food, but it can include money as a stand-in for means of production. It doesn't make sense to contrast "capital" with "money" when what you really mean is "all goods which are not money".
In any case, the difference is utility. The value of money is (almost) entirely derived from its use in trade; it's not consumed and it doesn't directly serve as a means of production. If a factory burns down or food spoils then society is poorer for it, but if the amount of money in existence decreases then nothing of value is lost, provided it affects everyone holding currency equally. (In the case of someone dying the only one not affected equally is the deceased, who isn't around to object to the loss and thus doesn't count.) We still have all the consumable goods and means of production which we had before, and the purchasing power of the remaining currency will adjust to compensate for the change in the money supply.
This is a solved problem. Entities that have to custody large amounts of crypto use multi-sig wallets where N of M keys are needed to unlock them. The keys are given to a N people and kept in different locations. If someone dies, N of the remaining people can move the assets to a new wallet.
Note that this wasn't a case of the money being lost because the key was lost when the owner died as per the initial headlines - in this case the money simply wasn't there in the first place: "Quadriga likely never invested the funds entrusted to it, according to Chainalysis, ... Either the funds were never received or quickly went missing" and "Ernst & Young found five Quadriga cold wallet addresses, but they were empty, containing no cryptocurrency since April 2018."[0]
Key management is definitely difficult and is full of tradeoffs depending on the risks you want to protect against. There are some nice guides out there that go into some of the details[1][2] as well as inheritance plans, and it typically involves multisig wallets (2 of 3, 3 of 5, etc) with some of the keys stored with a lawyer or other trusted party. Some commercial solutions exist like Casa which can make it seemingly easier, but has increased risk as a result. If you don't plan ahead, it's likely gone, but the setup time/cost of these solutions really only makes sense for large amounts.
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.
7 or so years ago, a friend of mine passed away. He had setup and explained a complicated encryption scheme to his wife that stored all their digital stuff. She didn't remember any of that, and then it was permanently inaccessible to her.
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.
> 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.
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.
There’s already a practice of businesses storing a paper copy of a critical infrastructure password in a safe for emergencies. I don’t see why the same concept couldn’t be used here.
I know you're facilitating a conversation about key discipline, and I don't mean to derail you from that, but it's not clear that the problem here was really an inaccessible wallet. You can read the Ontario government report on it [1].
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.
So what happens to these digital coins in the face of loss of keys? Actually, what do banks do as well? If someone dies with a large sum in an account, how is it different than a digital currency at that point? There's no physical tangible good that has value. It's just a number in a digital ledger for crypto or typical bank. Is the only difference in this case the encryption, otherwise typical banking rules would apply?
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.
I'll add to that the issue that it's extremely unlikely for there to be no heirs, as even if you made no family and your parents are dead, there's still likely to be e.g. some third-degree cousins. There are some cases (e.g. related to the Holocaust or immigrants where all the local family is dead and there are no contacts with the overseas relatives) but generally there's quite some time for distant relatives to apply until eventually the state (i.e. the general public) takes it over.
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.
would it be possible to program a smart contract tied to the key owner's death in some provable way, in order to release a key retrieval mechanism to their heir?
I suppose you could surgically implant a private key inside your body that could be used to decrypt a cache of your other or private keys. It'd have to be somewhere that can't be accessed without killing you, though.
People need some backstory on this one. We aren’t even sure he is really dead and I wouldn’t be surprised that this book and story is a way for her to distance herself from the very reasonable suspicions on her.
Just a thought: could Gerald Cotten have also been a stolen identity, as his co-founder Michael Patryn was (Michael Patryn was actually "Omar Dhanani who was convicted on identity theft charges in the U.S. and served 18 months in Federal prison"[0])? It would be much easier to fake the death of a stolen identity and reassume your real identity, rather than fake the death of your real identity and assume a stolen one for the rest of your life.
Yes, identity theft includes things as basic as using someone else's credit card. I learned that when I reported that someone rifled through our car, took a credit card, and tried to use it at a gas station.
That 700k is not referring to someone actually assuming someone elses identity. A tiny fraction of them might be, but tax return fraud or unemployment fraud seem like far more likely options.
Apparently it's quite easy if you have a passport from a country considered wealthy (e.g. EU).
>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.
Is there some kind of contest to produce the most outlandish explanations of this matter?
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.
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)
I don't know why this is downvoted. I also have Crohn's and it is word-for-word true.
Sudden death of Crohn's is something I cannot imagine and I've been trying for good 5 minutes now.
My Crohn's is under control and has always been fairly mild, but having spent a week in hospital when it was at its worst I can see how this could happen, I lost enough blood for the doctors to be very concerned. A severe flare can definitely be life threatening.
I'm cherry picking a stat from this article, but it doesn't appear totally out of the realm of possibility to die from Crohns.
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).
Maybe it's downvoted for the "guarantee he's alive" - Even if sudden death from Crohn's is unlikely, would suicide also be plausible, if the stolen funds were starting to catch up with him?
Perhaps I should’ve said “he definitely didn’t die of Crohns somewhere in India” - yeah, I admit he could be dead by this point for various other reasons.
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've seen it stated that he died of "complications from Crohn's disease" which in my mind would include a surgery gone wrong. I had an unexpected surgery which required anesthesia during a trip abroad myself, it's likely the chances of death from the surgery or event itself were somewhere in the 0.1-1% range.
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.
There are really good treatments for it these days. People live with it relatively comfortably when they can get the right medicine, while in the past they would have died early painful deaths.
I have Crohns also, and basically have no effects from it besides occasional bloating and slightly-more-than-normal pooping 99% of the time. Strangely, the one massive event that occurred happened while traveling (ended up requiring surgery, which, which theoretically could have killed me). I also travelled in India for a few weeks (where Cotten died) and was fine with the food until a flare-up on the plane trip home (Delhi belly is a common thing among tourists).
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
After pricing furniture at La-Z-Boy recently, I could see where 90K could be used to furnish a few rooms in a house. I was looking at a new living room set and it was close to 45K by the time we had finished customizing the fabric, seat fill, and adding options to the furniture.
There are other things that seem weird about this, but, the furniture store pricing wasn't one of them.
I think that is why evan__ suggested the heart valve defect, a genetic condition that often goes undetected until it kills you. You often hear of stories of young, athletic people dropping dead and being linked to some defect they've had since birth that went undetected.
I'm close to someone who has it, and I have to admit that my first response was also: "uh, what?". However it can happen.
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 Crohn's related deaths I've read about have been from complications from surgery, extreme blood loss and suicide (people with extreme cases can't deal with the pain).
Go watch Dead Mans Switch...you'll see it much more complex than that and even with some really deep forensic analysis they never found where the coins were (if there were really any left)
You can find me pretty easily from my username as well as a fairly long history of my posts about my medical issues.
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.
I try not to reply, but I probably owe you some clarification.
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.
The bbc article is eye opening her objection to an investigation is very telling, she has those peoples money and she is not giving it back willingly. I think the walrus article could be a paid promotion considering its missing this or any push back.
I read the post's article, and the two articles in the top-level comment. Transferring real estate into a trust isn't a viable way to keep ill gotten gains from a bankruptcy court. Selling assets would only be sketchy if she attempted to divert some of that money, which isn't mentioned (and I'm sure those transactions received intense scrutiny). What other peculiar things did she do?
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.
> Transferring real estate into a trust isn't a viable way to keep ill gotten gains from a bankruptcy court. Selling assets would only be sketchy if she attempted to divert some of that money, which isn't mentioned (and I'm sure those transactions received intense scrutiny).
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.
How does that support what you implied in your earlier comment? From what I see the incentives are just all wrong. Based on my limited reading, she appears as someone working within the legal system to keep her (ill gotten) wealth. You can condemn her for that, but it's a far cry from being in on some larger plan of faking her husband's death. And her not being "the sharpest tool in the shed" is even more evidence against her knowingly being part of a larger plan.
The impression I get reading her statements is that they belong to a lawyer-constructed narrative which makes it difficult to form an accurate opinion.
There's a great podcast about Cotten called Exit Scam. I'm not entirely convinced that Robertson is an unwitting party to this. My guess is that the author did what she could to endear herself to Robertson to gain exclusivity on certain aspects of the story, but it comes off as more of an apology than it probably needs to be.
Well ... she's not a "Bitcoin Widow", she's a Fraudster's Widow, so I don't know what she expected.
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.
For the last seven years, I've run a tiny one-man I.T. consultancy with barely a dozen consistent clients--they're all great clients, but I am in no way the pinnacle of dynamism--and even I have a "hit by a bus" insurance where I assigned a friend and local I.T. professional with the responsibility and capability to take over if anything happens to me. He would have access to my I.T. documentation platform, password manager, and has met each of my clients' principal contacts. To think someone could run a financial institution in this way with anything less than bad intentions is laughable.
I have an envelope in a fire safe in my house that says, "Open on Death". In it is a list of all my accounts and passwords. My computer password, my phone password, everything. I use a password manager, so it's an easy thing to print the list of passwords. If I were to die, anyone could pick up that envelope and have the literal keys to my kingdom.
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.
Or if your house was burgled, and someone took that envelope before you died, you'd be in a world of hurt. Especially now that anyone that reads HN knows your secret. The amount of details some people post online just boggles me.
Seems like there should be a market for N of M key encrypted post-death documents.
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.
FWIW fire safes only protect their contents for a short period of time (IIRC typically under a few hours). You may want to make a backup and store it in a bank vault or similar.
You're saying this online with an username that appears to be your real name; this is a real risky way to handle your entire financial / technical set-up.
Update: Since I unwittingly exposed myself on HN, I have updated my security arrangement. I have destroyed the paper list of passwords, which are now only stored in an encrypted password manager. Pieces of information to enable access to the password manager have been divided up among family members.
eh..this is too much info to reveal online...how bout say, a VPS (with your preferred cloud service provider), which if not logged into in say 40 days, sends an SMS or Email to your Wife or Next of Kin with your secrets, pins, passwords and locations to anything physical.
> VPS (with your preferred cloud service provider), which if not logged into in say 40 days, sends an SMS or Email to your Wife or Next of Kin with your secrets, pins, passwords and locations to anything physical.
Perhaps even better: only have a cryptographic key on the cloud, the data is duplicated and stored encrypted with family?
The title is grossly misleading. Bitcoin had nothing to do with any of this. It should be `Confessions of a Scammer Widow`. Cotton was scamming before bitcoin even existed.
Summary: "I knew the money was stolen, and all I wanted to do was press 'reset' and keep all of it. But they wouldn't let me. I didn't like giving the money back, but I did learn a valuable lesson about how I enjoyed being rich."
>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.
Because it was a Ponzi scheme, according to that theory. If you're running a Ponzi scheme - as Madoff demonstrates - your good luck and your good life tend to run out. The theory is that he faked his death when the music was about to stop.
I am really curios - how does an exchange never materialise any trades and people don't notice?
Also, as a fellow Crohnie - how do you "suddenly" die of Crohn's?
The trades did clear on the exchange, and withdrawals were forthcoming until December 2018 when Gerlad disappeared. Gerald didn't steal all the crypto, he just stole some of it, but because he stole crypto instead of cash, when the price spiked, his debts increased much faster than he could pay them.
I coded out during an operation to repair a ruptured intestine that was a complication of Crohns. I was also told if I had waited even a day more that the sepsis from the rupture could have killed me. It's definitely possible.
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?
Very interesting article. This kind of thorough investigation really shows how math was never the missing component in monetary policy and economic exchange.
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?
It's an excerpt from the book "Bitcoin Widow: Love, Betrayal and the Missing Millions" by Jennifer Robertson with Stephen Kimber [0]. The CBC ran a story that provides an overview of the whole debacle [1].
This is only tangentially related to the headline, but do you think divorce courts in the future will grant divorcing spouses half of their partner's cryptocurrency holdings? Certainly, if someone were to transfer the bulk of their investments into crypto to avoid sharing, that's an evasion mechanism the courts would be interested in countering.
This is already the case. I mean you can't hide your cash by buying houses or yachts or shares in a company. So crypto is no different - it's an asset owned by you.
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.
This will be very interesting (but likely not). People have tried to hide assets from tax authorities, spouses, creditors, etc for thousands of years.
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.
Even before crypto "if you're good you're good". People have always gotten away with these things. It's just usually because they either didn't make a mistake (very rare) or the authorities didn't care enough (very common).
One would think the FBI counterintel team chasing international nuke sub secrets sales would be in the "if you're good you're good" bucket, but who knows. the raw indictment for that case is worth a read if you're interested in this space.
I'm referring to the skill (luck?) of the criminal. Yes, every once in a while there's going to be the "perfect murder", the "perfect heist", etc.
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.
Yes, but new technology makes it easier. Think of all the logistics associated with burying $10,000 in a hole in the ground and the skills you need to do it properly, and compare to the relative ease of acquiring and stashing $10,000 in cryptocurrency.
The internet brings out the absolute worst in people. They can rant about the worst things and find like minded people. Truly disturbing. I was in crypto for a while but I also easily see how it has fostered a terrible culture.
> According to Jennifer Robertson, Cotten's widow, he died on 9 December 2018 while travelling in India.
> 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.
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
He supposedly died of Crohn's disease though. I can't imagine anyone traveling across the world to India of all places in the throes of a Crohn's flareup..
Keys didn't have anything to do with it, he stole user funds.
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.
TLDR, spent all the money not caring where it came from now that she knows she still doesn't care about anyone but herself. She has three houses with scammed money no interest in selling them and returning the money.
Im confused the article said she couldn't return the crypto because she was locked out of it but still has the three houses she bought with that money? How is that returning nearly all of it? That word "nearly" is doing a lot of lifting.
>The walrus defending people that seem to be quite obviously criminal
Colour me surprised
This is a hit piece on crypto written with the facade of trying to defend a "widow"
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."