QuadrigaCX: The Plot Thickens
Female dragonflies fake sudden death to avoid male advances.
QuadrigaCX (Canadian Exchange)
For those of you who haven't been following the news, this story is all over the place.
QuadrigaCX claims that their founder and CEO is dead, and with him the keys to cold storage. This story is highly suspect. Many people go so far as to suspect the death has been faked.
Cotton is having financial troubles at his company, so he travels to India to work on an orphanage? While suffering from Crohn’s he decided to go to India? Gets married and sets up a will within a month of his “death.” Manages to set up a plan ($100k) for his two dogs so that they’re taken care of. Doesn’t think to make sure the nearly $200m his exchange watches is also taken care of.
Litecoin from supposed cold storage wallets has also moved, damaging the claim that the keys are lost.
Not your keys? Not your crypto!
This is yet another constant reminder that no one should keep a significantly large amount of crypto on exchanges. What constitutes "large" is to be defined by the holder, but the principal is still the same. Centralized exchanges will continue to be hacked and scammed until they no longer exist.
Corporations have a way of cutting corners for profit. Some are running fractional reserves. Some aren't using the best security. All of them are in this game to turn a profit. All hot wallets are a honeypot treasure trove for motivated hackers.
Steem
I hate to beat a dead horse here, but our platform appears to have the best security in this regard. People who know absolutely nothing about crypto can come here, earn a few coins, and be incentivized to learn about proper key management.
When one thinks about Bitcoin security it is a nightmare in comparison. You get one key, one chance, and if you fail it's all over. Meanwhile, if my posting key gets hacked I lose my upvote powers for five days. If my active key gets hacked I'll lose a few dollars. If my master key gets hacked I can recover my account. The only way to lose everything is to have my master key hacked (which never sees the light of day) and my phone hacked at the same time.
The setup we have going here makes the barrier to entry for crypto noobs much lower. This is especially true when one considers that our @account-names are the public keys themselves.
Andreas Antonopoulos' experience with securing Bitcoin keys is that non-technically savvy users have a much higher chance of losing their money due to implementation error than actually having the coins stolen by a bad actor. Steem makes it much easier to mitigate these damages.
Say you lost your master password. In the realm of Bitcoin you just lost everything. However, on our platform you could still use the active key to power down and cash out. Also, any master key that was valid within the last month can be used in account recovery. This may sound like a niche use-case, but I have personally seen this happen because the greatest chance to lose the master password happens when it gets changed.
One thing remains clear: as long as we trust third parties to protect our financial sovereignty we will continue to be disappointed by their failure, whether accidental or with malicious intent. We might as well paint big targets on these institutions with the caption "steal from here".
This post is a GRAND SLAM ... expect the entire fulltimebot posse to show up soon :)
Well haven't you been busy.
Much appreciated.
sorry.. just had to upvote a bit more as I believe your post deserves more than a dime.. ;-)
Ha! Thanks
Truth IS stranger than fiction
This guy, could have gone to India where he died of medical complications of his condition just after updating his will and just at the point where his exchanges is coming under scrutiny.
I mean, stranger things have happened.
But, what are the odds of that?
I feel that horse needs to be beaten some more.
In the future, all exchanges will be done with something like crypto wrappers, that are miniature escrow account. But, until then, don't leave your coins on exchanges unless you are exchanging them actively. And if that is the case, take profits regularly.
Steem is actually very good for learning to send / receive coins.
Especially paired with Blocktrades.us, or open/bitshares.
You can learn to move coins around really easy, with minimal loss.
Good practice. Good learning.
I don't know if it's true or not but someone said if you buy from Blocktrades you get one steem for one dollar regardless if the price of steem is lower. Is that true?
Just go to https://blocktrades.us/ and find out
Currently
100 STEEM will get you 30.124 SBD
Now, what you are probably thinking of is the internal conversion (done by the steem block chain). Where it does give you $1 worth of STEEM, no matter what the SBD was worth.
When this started, STEEM was always less than $1, so it was easy to keep the SBD peg to $1. But, lately it has been all over the place.
This conversion feature has been turned off in steemit.com
If you want to trade SBD for STEEM, use the internal currency market.
Yeah, sounds pretty suspect to me as well. Steems safety protocols for those like myself who don't trust our abilities to stop hackers since governments and corporations can't(or our ability to 100% maintain them at all times) makes it the leading edge chain as far as the masses.
Totally off subject, but if you get time could you do an indepth post on the Steemengine token creation process that came out recently? I have read several threads, but there is a lot of key information I am not seeing. Maybe they exist on threads I haven't read, but it seems from what I have read to be a vanity token machine. I don't read how it will actually benefit Steem, how they are managed independent of the Steemengine group as far as creation etc. Are there costs associated per token? I could list a million things I am not understanding on them. Since you have been my go to on explaining crypto I thought it wouldn't hurt to ask.
Could you point me in the right direction? There are a lot of projects that use the keywords Steem and Engine.
This was the initial post I saw on them.
https://steemit.com/steem/@runicar/smt-s-finally-here-but-not-made-by-stinc#@runicar
I don't do the discord thing which short circuited my beginning questions on that thread. I'm not sure if I should get excited or if its just going to be a watered down vanity token press to make shitcoins that no one will ever hear about to fund non existing, dead end projects (enrich the shitcoin maker and their pals). I appreciate any insights you may gain and share on this. The site seems scarce of posts on what should be great news.
Right right this is the project that caused @shredz7 to change the name of his project from SteemEngine to Stratos. He is much closer to these projects than I am you should ask him. He knows a lot more about the technical details.
I seem to recall a conversation we had some weeks ago about how these smart contracts might be vulnerable to attack by DDOS and the like.
The concept of it all is still sound. If you can create nodes that are in consensus developers can make assets on the Steem blockchain just by leveraging our posting key cryptography. Given the rules of the digital asset, they can be created and transferred by piggybacking info carried by the main chain (in this case Steem).
I think the most exciting thing about it is that it's being attempted on multiple fronts. Something is bound to stick.
We've got SMT being developed, but that was taking too long.
Now we seem to have SteemEngine, Stratos, and Vaporchain in the works.
Exciting times.
and this is for your prior article about self voting.. seriously.. your post are quality wise from another level!
Another great post about cryptocurrency.
The advantages of wallet security and other unique aspects of Steem and Steemit are well illustrated here.
Thank you
Every story in the Canadian media about this mentions crypto's lack of regulation. One was like "imagine your bank manager died and you could not access your account ever again". One more justification for government interference
I would make the argument that it's going in the exact opposite direction. The people will eventually be put in control of their own finances. Crypto can't be regulated in the long run. It regulates itself.
There will be new technologies that prevent this from happening altogether. For example, the keys are kept locked on a smart contract and every time you log into your phone that action prevents the keys from being released. In the event of an untimely demise the keys would automatically be sent out after X days of not being suppressed.
Very suspicious indeed but the great fact about blockchain is the transparency it provides. Given the abiity to track those funds, there will be limited places it will be able to move without being “tainted.”. We have already seen exchanges freeze stolen funds in an effort to support ecosystems. In this case, if they ever move it would be a confirmation of the suspicion here and lead to additional measures I would imagine.
Posted using Partiko iOS
I have a few tokens on exchanges but I am only trusting Coinbase, Bittrex and Binance.
Any other exchanges I use is to get a coin, get it out as soon as possible. 😂
Yeah if you are going to trust exchanges, those are a good pick. It's also noteworthy to point out that if you had an equal amount on each exchange this would decrease centralized single-point-of-failure.
Personally I'm willing to put 10%-15% of my total holdings on a single centralized exchange. There's always the chance that my security is the one that's lacking and the only coins I'm left with are the ones I put on exchanges.
I am not the only one who worries about this, I seen the concern with others, that is all the personal information you have to give to these exchanges to interact. Dubious people running off with all your personally identifiable information would be just a big as a concern for me.
That's why Binance is awesome. I've given them nothing and can withdraw 2 Bitcoins per day. Of course I can't convert that Bitcoin directly into fiat but it's still nice.
Do you have to buy bitcoin to buy steem?...do they even have steem on Binance?..if they do can you still do that without giving out all your personal information?
Not ur keys, not ur crypto, it was the first thing I learned in crypto... DEX will change the whole paradigma of the space, once people actually start using them, which I think they will once the space gets more regulated and people won't want that regulation in their trading so they will change to DEXs... let's wait and see.. I only "trust" in coinbase and binance, and i put trust between quotes because i would rather have the cryptos in my ledger ofc... I only put my portfolio in a exchange when I see signs of total market dump, last time I did it was before the 6k drop...
If this whole thing was actually a scam i hope they find the owner of the exchange and arrest him...
Really good work on this post, this stupid news has caused major fud among the population, even my grandfather called me asking me if i had lost everything... my grandfather is 80! He knows nothing about cryptos, and this somehow was able to reach his ears...
Mabye the indian coroner has now the late CEO's keys....
I trusted a OpenLedger online Account that I only ever accessed from behind a trusted VPN..and I sorely regret it.