Passwords are fleeting. It is easy to forget them. When you cannot login into your, say, My Little Pony forum account, you give them your e-mail address and reset the old password to get a new one; when you cannot get into your e-bank account, you take a trip to their nearest post, show them your ID card and they give you a new password. When you forgot the combination to your bitcoin wallet… well, that is where problems start.
Heh, ”problems”. More like ”an impenetrable wall that will leave you with a cold, nagging feeling of hopelesness and misfortune”.
Such is a wall that the clients of QuadrigaCX, the largest bitcoin stock market in Canada, are facing right now. CEO of this company, one Gerald Cotten, has died in December 2018. The cause of death was a Leśniewski-Crohn disease the man have caught in India, but that is besides the point. The point is that Cotten was the only person who knew the password to QuadrigaCX’s cold wallet – the account where the company kept all its bitcoins. Week of efforts by the man’s family and co-workers turned out fruitless. As it is, there is 145 million dollars worth of bitcoins sitting in the account and there is no way anyone can get to it.
As is usually the case when big money is concerned, there are juicy rumours floating about. One of them is that Gerald Cotten has faked his death in a far off land in order to get away with all the money; other is that his wife, Jessica Robertson, is lying about the amount of moneyin QuadrigaCX’s cold wallet and that the market actually went bankrupt, with Cotten’s real or faked death being a way of avoiding insolvency. Whatever the truth is, such stories are a pretty decent criminal novel material.