Digital exchange loses $137M as founder takes passwords to the grave

Not your keys, not your coins.

Pretty irresponsible to not store the encryption key in something like a bank safety deposit box or sharded across multiple people that don't know each but come together like in the event of a death to reconstruct the key.

First of all, I find this whole thing sad and hilarious -- I have been speaking up against calling it "investing in cryptocurrency" because a) it's gambling not investing b) it's not a currency. Nonetheless, this entire thing stinks.

1. Sudden death from Chron's disease is not unheard of https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9780667 but it's described as a "rare complication".

2. Where is the address of this cold storage so people can see the coins not moving since the alleged death? I know people are trying to figure out the address based on transactions from the hot wallet but if there is some tumbling involved it'll be hard / impossible.

3. In this 2015 article https://archive.is/Gw2x9

> Cotten, in turn, spoke to Quadriga’s security strengths, noting that the exchange uses multi-signature cold storage to secure bitcoin holdings.

This directly contradicts the claim only he had the key.

I signed up for QuadrigaCX but never transferred any funds through it. The process involved exchanging quite a bit of personal information and considering how they handled 137M worth of coins, I doubt they're treating anyones personal information with even a single spec of security.

On a long enough horizon, every Bitcoin will be lost.

Maybe you CAN take it with you.