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.
https://www.newsbtc.com/2019/02/06/ceo-who-held-150m-in-crypto-died-in-a-region-known-for-having-a-fake-death-mafia/
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".
Don't trust exchanges to hold your coins for you.
Trust in yourself, acquire financial autonomy.
That's entire point of this decentralized movement.
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