Trust No One: The Hunt For The Crypto King

[merylinkid]

This dropped on Netflix at the end of March.

It's the story of the rise and fall of Gerald Cotten and his crypto currency exchange Quadriga CX.    EVERYONE was exchanging bitcoin on this site -- until it suddenly stopped working.   Then the founder "dies" in mysterious circumstances.   Claims are only HE had the keys to unlock the crypto wallets.   Users become "internet sleuths" to find the missing money.

Yes its as wild as it sounds.   One guy though, is a freaking idiot.   He converts all his assets to cash.   Then he wants to send the money home to Canada.   BUT if he goes through a bank they take a 2% fee.   Of $400,000K that's a lot of money to him (or you know $8K leaving him with $380K).   So he gets the brilliant idea of putting the money in Quadriga to buy bitcoin then immediately withdrawing.   Because, you know, no fees involved there RIGHT?  Except he does it just as Quadriga is falling apart.   All his money is gone.    No sympathy for this guy.   He thought he was gaming the system and got scammed.   

 

[Adiba]

Just watched this and even though I know net to nothing about crypto, couldn’t help but be dumbfounded by the guy who invested everything he had in it. He was a software engineer—not stupid. I guess otherwise smart people can make dumb choices.

My opinion is that Cotten is actually dead. I read that he went into septic shock, which can kill someone in a day. He was the Bernie Madoff of crypto. Took the money and gambled it on more crypto and lost money. But who knows?

[peppergal]

Yeah that engineer was an idiot about his finances.  Got hit majorly with the initial crash and had to sell his apartment and move back to Canada.  Decided he didn't want to pay $8000 in wire fees to get the remaining $392,000 home safely through regulated means, so he decides he'll funnel the money through crypto.   Even if the exchange had been legit, he ran the risk that market volatility would cost him more than $8000 in trading losses.  It's not like he had a stellar track record timing his trades.  And seriously if someone is offering you a 10% bonus for letting them hold your money for a few days when the rest of the established financial world is not offering rates that high, you gotta ask yourself where that 10% is coming from.  That 2% transfer fee from the bank isn't just greed.  Yes they are making a profit, but they also need to cover costs related to moving money across national borders like the infrastructure, the employees, the deposit insurance, the regulatory costs and more.  Things which a crypto exchange (potentially minus the insurance and regulatory costs) would also need to cover, so them paying you 10% if they aren't playing fast and loose with your money makes no sense.  I hope if he got paid for his appearance here that he learned enough to have someone with financial smarts guide him this time...

The whole time I went back and forth on if Jen was just someone so blinded by love and/or $$$ she had no clue what was going on because she didn't care to look, or if she was aware that he was doing something hinky but didn't care as long as the money kept coming in and she got her luxurious vacations.   That he was using her real estate company to send people payments should have been a big flashing red flag that his exchange did not have the back end infrastructure to do what it claimed it was doing.  At least she eventually forfeited a bunch of the marital real estate holdings to help settle a small portion of the outstanding company debt.