Lessons from QuadrigasteemCreated with Sketch.

in bitcoin •  6 years ago  (edited)

I'm sure by now plenty of people have been informed on the newest Exchange Scandal. These happen so often, that I've lost the ability to be surprised anymore. I mean, we know this, or at least we should, leaving funds on an exchange just because "its convenient" is a sure way of setting ourselves up for failure.



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I realize that when it comes to the big picture, losing 190 million dollars worth of funds is a drop in the bucket, but this is only true in the macro sense. To the thousands of customers who held their funds in Quadriga this event is life changing, and as you can imagine lawsuits are being filed.

What is more interesting to me is how this exchange was setup. The idea that we are being sold here is that the owner, the CEO, was the only person with access to the cold storage and that his recent passing simply means nobody has access to cold storage at the moment.

Let's think about this for a second, not only is a centralized exchange a single point of failure, which in principle I'm against, but along the same lines, this particular "business model" had a single person in charge of the most important thing of all, the private keys.

We are also being told he died in India, while he was doing charitable work. This could be true, of course, how would I know? but, it does seem fishy to put it lightly.

I've been trying to keep up with the story, reading through some tweets and whatnot, and for what I can tell, doing charity work in India is not easy, as it's heavily regulated, and apparently Quadriga's CEO was not doing things "right". Again, just seems fishy.

The main lesson here my friends is the simplest one: Don't leave your funds in exchanges, don't think that it's just more convenient, because you don't want to install wallets or even worse buy a hardware wallet to store your alt-bags. If you are serious about this, if you are looking to play the long game, you have to be willing to put in the work and not be lazy when it comes to your personal security.

There is one silver lining to all this believe it or not, Bitcoin just became scarcer, and the 26,000 coins that are now locked in cold storage, the 96 million dollars in today's prices are now out of circulation. This, added to the fact that we are one year away from the halvening, really put things into perspective for me.

It's not just about hodling my friends, it's about doing it right...

@meno

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If one wants to trade one should only keep a small % of his portfolio on the exchange to trade! Not ur keys not ur coins, that's basic crypto knowledge!! And only keep on the exchange what one is willing to lose!

It's the first time I'm hearing about the india story, it all sounds way to fishy...

dude, good to see you back!

Been learning how to trade and making some changes in my life, now that I got it all figured out I'm back to posting! :) Today was my first comeback post, let's see if I can post at least once every 2 days xD It's good to see that I still know most of the faces around!

Hope everything is going great with u @meno!

This anti bitcoin bitch on reddiit r/bitcoin was a fuckin bitch so i tore him apart with my comment that i have to post HERE cuz reddit.com/r/bitcoin banned me for talking about steem, fucking (((them))) always shutting me down
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ao7egw/cleansing_of_the_temple_jan_3_2009_colorized/efz69m2/

What? Anyone who had money in quadrigaCX deserved to have it lost! For Months people had been WARNING people to hold their own coins! This was even the special month DESIGNATED to take coins off exchanges, Not your keys, not your coins, and LOOK AT what happens! BITCOIN is still perfectly safe, its only those who didnt hold their own coins who lost them...and everyone ELSE will end up receiving the value of those coins after the mnarket sees they are confirmed to have been burned, meaning that value MUST go into the OTHER coins, so soprry it only HELPS when you loose coins. Of course temporarily it might scare some people but over time it will balance out mathematically and the market will be stuck with a SMALLER amount of coins to trade, and thus the prices will go up... all those hundreds of thousands of bitcoins lost to Canadians means everyone else receives that value bro.. its like when you BURN coins???? DOnt be irationally selfish and act like this is Bitcoins fault.... this has nothing to do with bitcoin and everything to do with bad business practices... and dont tell me some shit about regulation which never would have stopped this from happening....the free market solves these problems, people now will think twice and we just wont ever see people holding that many bitcoins now without backups.... trust me this was the wakeup call the industry needed and never again will THIS happen... people will be responsible and there are PLENTY of ways to hide keys split up into multiple pieces and given to people who dont even know they have it... Also there are people like Lawyers and others who are WAY too entrenched into the legal system to even think about stealing the Bitcoin keys... and yeah yeah I Know this is STILL a VERY unique problem and very catastrophic risk that can allow one person to steal ALL the money of a bank, which no one experiences in any other business, WHICH IS WHY projects like EOS and even other bitcoin forks will have these Long term TIME locks which make it IMPOSSIBLE to withdrawl the majority of the crypto, which can be staked on a blockchain, similar to how STEEM lets you LOCK your money in in Steempower so you will need 13 week Power down period 1 week at a time receiving 1/13th of your money in sgements, so yeah, gfreat way to make sur rethat even if someone steals ur keys u can still do a password change and befor ete first pwoer down get yoru password changed by yoru backup account.

So on DPOS systems and future bitcoin Improvemnet Proticals for BTC, Lighteningnetwork and other forks, we can se waysto LOCK the bitcoin but ALSO give other users backup privalwges so if theres NO activity for 6 monrths or 1 or 2 years someoen else can reset teh account... if you8 want...

This is GREAT for Bitcoin! it burns the coins and no one gets them! It teaches people not to let someone ELSE hold their money! Banks would have experienced the SAME fucking problem on a MUCH bigger scale during the 2008 financial crisis and your ignorance on this proves to me youre just too young to even understand what actually happened, and how if there was no bailout the banks would have collapsed in a way that would have made people WISH they had some digital money algorythm since the 90s or even 80s and honestly IBM and DARPA/Military INQTEL etc had been discussing a decentralized cryptographicaly protected money system, with people in the past trading keys which early computers would have been able to actually check on early 80s level dial up internet, which would have had servers solely for the purpose of checking a public key to see if there was money in it, and then someone would spend their private key and transfer the money to their wallet, and exchanges would exist in real life with pen and paper, and a money algorythm should have existed a long time ago.... anyway......I just love the idea of pre bitcoin blockchain like the one with the New York Times news papers...

I think that many will closely be following those addresses for sure as the story is as unbelievable as it could be. Having seen this repeat many times, it continues to surprise me to see so many customers leaving funds on exchanges! A tough lesson to learn.

Posted using Partiko iOS

It's not an issue that people keep coins on the exchange. People transferred BTC, exchange them for fiat and money didn't come back to people's bank account. At least that's how I see it. I use this exchange before and never get cash deposited on time as they promised.

It turns out the fiat issue is something completely separate from the cold storage issue, meaning that they were having problems with the banks in Canada prior to this event.

Right now people can't withdraw their crypto, on top of the fact that those who've been attempting to withdraw their fiat had not been able to for months.

It's beyond fishy at this point.

Posted using Partiko Android

@meno, Every situation and incident brings a lesson and we should pursue the lesson so that we can stay away from the mistakes which can prove as an big loss in future. Stay blessed.

I really pity for those who lost their funds in that exchange. Had it been they have seen the future earlier

Haha yeah i did hear about this. Unbelievable. If this is part of a conspiracy to steal coins that weak excuse can at least only be used once. In addition, I'm sure there will be someone who keeps permanent tabs on those wallets to make sure they don't go anywhere. Best thing about transparency.

This is also the best thing about steem. My experience here is that controlling your own keys is easier. Having 4 levels with the master never seeing the light of day is very nice. Account names as public keys is icing on the cake

I thought it was fishy when I first heard the story. This type of exchange shouldn't be allowed as one person controlling everything is just way too risky. Keep forgetting about the halving next year.

Another lesson on “avoiding key man dependency “: thanks for sharing @meno

Posted using Partiko iOS

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