Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff has said he doesn't see bitcoin succeeding and that it "could have some use in a dystopian future. At the time of writing, bitcoin has been declared "dead" in mainstream media times. Despite the scores of times various personalities and publications have pronounced it dead, the asset continues to rise in value and get adopted by major Wall Street institutions.
Bitcoin's "death" can be tracked at Bitcoin Obituary , a parody website that collates news articles and blogs. It has already been declared dead nine times this year and 14 times in You know, occasionally kind of one-on-one, you might be able to have a bit of a conversation with him," he said. Giroux described him as "nerdy" and into sci-fi, with a goofy sense of humour. What really stood out for Giroux was Cotten's love for technology. His high school math teacher, who asked not to be identified, said Cotten hired people on the internet to build code for him.
The teacher said he was smart, had an interest in money and was always "looking for an angle. At the time, he was a member of an online forum called TalkGold. Three years later, he and business partner Michael Patryn launched the cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX. Patryn worked mostly behind the scenes, while Cotten was the face of the company. That meant evangelizing about bitcoin on YouTube and at events and conferences organized by crypto enthusiasts. He billed himself as a disruptor who would challenge traditional forms of banking.
During a guest appearance on a Vancouver podcast called True Bromance in , Cotten said he wasn't actually promoting a business, but a new way of thinking. Bitcoin, he explained, is a peer-to-peer network, and the cryptocurrency is traded and stored with the use of a decentralized ledger called the blockchain. The transactions are public, but users' identities remain anonymous. Then you get rid of the fees.
You get rid of a lot of the regulations," Cotten said. Cotten poses for a local newspaper a month after launching QuadrigaCX in It was a spectacular run-up," said Amy Castor, a freelance journalist who covers cryptocurrencies and financial fraud and was one of the first to report on Cotten's early history, on her blog. Everybody wanted to get into cryptocurrency, hoping they could make money for nothing. As the value of bitcoin was rising and more people entrusted their money with QuadrigaCX, Cotten was snatching up properties in Nova Scotia and British Columbia with his soon-to-be wife, Jennifer Robertson.
He also purchased luxury vehicles, a yacht and a Cessna aircraft. They were living the high life and went on lavish vacations. Cotten once boasted that he had traveled to 56 countries, 37 of them with Robertson. Denyse Sibley By , however, their fortunes were turning. The crypto bubble had burst and the price of bitcoin was in a free fall. Throughout that time, many Quadriga customers tried to pull their money off of the exchange in an attempt to cut their losses.
A few others continued buying, placing their bets on the possibility that the price of bitcoin would go back up. But that meant Cotten had less cash needed to pay out the withdrawal requests. There were news reports of delays, with some customers waiting months for their money to be processed.
When bitcoin exchanges "start having withdrawal delays, that's when you start worrying. And that's when you get your money out," said Salkeld, the Vancouver bitcoiner. In the middle of this tumultuous year, Cotten and Robertson got married. At the end of November, on the advice of their lawyer, just days before their honeymoon in India, Cotten made out a will, leaving everything — the properties, digital assets, even his frequent flyer points — to Robertson. When Robertson posted on Quadriga's Facebook page in January that Cotten had suddenly died — due to complications from Crohn's disease — and later that he was the only person with the passcodes to customer funds, the crypto community was abuzz with theories.
These were some of the comments left on a bitcoin thread on the social media site Reddit after Cotten's death was announced. Reddit A month after Robertson publicly announced his death, Cotten's estate released a statement in reaction to the "upsetting questions raised" about whether he could possibly still be alive.
It included Robertson's account of Cotten's final days in India. In it, she said that the general manager of the Jaipur hotel helped Robertson with the documents required to have his body transported back to Canada. This included putting her in touch with a medical transportation company. According to the statement, Cotten was embalmed and placed in a casket and the transportation company flew Robertson and his body to New Delhi.
From there, they flew to Halifax on Dec. A closed casket funeral with a small group of family, friends and co-workers was held on Dec. Jennifer Robertson has declined CBC's repeated requests for an interview for this story. However, through an email from her lawyer, Robertson confirmed that "she was with Mr. Cotten at the time of his death and he is most certainly dead. None of that changed the fact that more than a quarter of a billion dollars of investor funds was missing.
QCX-INT and other creditors formed an online group where they would combine efforts to find out as much as they could about Cotten and the people behind his company. Finding Sceptre QCX-INT, which stands for "Quadriga Intelligence," spent the next few months running his business by day and spending his nights working on the investigation, driven by a sense of mounting outrage at every new revelation.
He posted his research online and encouraged others to share tips with him in April A tenacious man in his forties, he's as meticulous in his appearance as in his work. When the CBC interviewed him for the podcast via video chat, he was dressed in a black cap and dark vest, with no logos. I mean, I'm in the tech space. That's part of my world. And those can be revealing, because they can be used to connect to other data points.
By making that connection, he said, "there's a pattern of activity that doesn't just stretch back a few months, it stretches back years and years. Essentially Ponzi schemes, they promised very high returns but were unregulated and anonymous, disclosing little or no details about the investment or who was behind it.
The exchange of funds between investors and Sceptre would also be anonymous, and they would hide their transactions by using the earliest forms of digital currency. The more people that bought into the scheme, the more money you made, as long as you were among the first ones out. The last ones out would be left holding the bag. And if they wanted, they could pull their money out. But eventually, usually within, like, a matter of weeks or sometimes months, the website would just go offline," said Joe Castaldo, a business reporter at the Globe and Mail who also investigated Cotten's early activities on TalkGold.
And there was no way, no recourse for them, because they didn't know who was running the website. The digital currency transactions were completely anonymous. There's no way to trace them. So they just lost their money and that was it.
Cotten would have been just 15 years old at the time. During this research, QCX-INT also found a handful of websites linked to Cotten that offered a proxy service that would reroute a user's internet connection so that their IP address would be hidden — websites with names like Cloakedproxy.
It appears he was creating sites that helped other people disguise themselves in the digital space. In a screen capture from the Wayback Machine, one of those websites reads: "You can access virtually any site through our servers, and your boss or teachers won't know about it! It was Cotten's personal account, and featured videos he had posted of himself in his early twenties.
There was Cotten hanging his brother, Bradley, over a railing by his legs in an experiment to see whether he could drink upside down. There were also videos of Cotten burning various items — a Winnie the Pooh doll, a walnut, hair mousse, even Pokemon cards.
That video was posted in , about a year before Cotten launched Quadriga with Michael Patryn. The burning of money "was actually quite sickening to watch," he said. He responded by email, "I met Gerry in person at a restaurant in Ontario. We did not meet online on any forum. It's not clear when the two first met online, but there are posts of Sceptre and Patryn interacting that date back to TalkGold When Patryn suddenly disappeared from TalkGold in October , posts about him being a convicted felon started to appear on the forum.
Around that time there was news of arrests of individuals involved in a criminal network of fraudsters. For many years, Patryn passed it off as just rumours, misinformation spread by his enemies and competitors. But despite his denials, his past is well-documented in public and court records.
Not only that, those records reveal that Michael Patryn isn't even his original name. In , at the age of 22, Omar Dhanani pleaded guilty for his role in an identity theft ring called Shadowcrew. It was an online marketplace where people could buy stolen bank and credit card numbers, passports and other wares to commit identity fraud.
At the time of writing, bitcoin has been declared "dead" in mainstream media times. Despite the scores of times various personalities and publications have pronounced it dead, the asset continues to rise in value and get adopted by major Wall Street institutions. Bitcoin's "death" can be tracked at Bitcoin Obituary , a parody website that collates news articles and blogs.
It has already been declared dead nine times this year and 14 times in Its earliest death was recorded on December 15, — almost two years since its creation — by a blogger called "The Underground Economist," who predicted bitcoin would either remain a novelty forever or it would be "dead faster than you can blink.
The Bitcoin hash rate has reached its peak, smashing new highs of The hash rate usually refers to the amount of computing and process power being contributed to mine a block of BTC. Whenever the Bitcoin hash rate increases, the computational power required to mine new blocks also increases. And hence it results in squeezing of profits. As the rewards are paid in BTC and as the price is consolidating hard, it may be a huge loss for the miner which may even compel them to close mining too.
And in such cases, as fewer miners are available to mine, it may inversely impact the Bitcoin price in the coming days. And hence as predicted by the analyst, the asset may witness a steep drop very soon.
Previously, Bitcoin has bounced back and taken off every time it has hit the week MA. This happened in , and , as shown in the graph below: The price of Bitcoin tends to briefly dip below its week MA and then slowly work its way up, starting a new uptrend. This is an encouraging sign, given that BTC is trading very close to its week MA after short stints below it.
Also, based on previous patterns, BTC could dip below the week MA, but not too far below and not for too long. Besides the week moving average, the market-value-to-realized-value ratio MVRV suggests that the worst is behind us, and the current lull is not likely to persist for the long term. This means it is the perfect time to buy the dip and start accumulating BTC. First in and then later in March If this pattern continues, the price of BTC might fall briefly, but an upward trend should follow.
Even if the prices drop, experts have pointed out several historic support levels that Bitcoin could fall back on. So, as you can see, there is plenty of reason to believe that Bitcoin is not dead. Moreover, judging by these on-chain metrics, Bitcoin should see an upward swing in the future.
Dr Doom economist Nouriel Roubini recently said the "Flintstones had a better monetary system" than bitcoin and that it shouldn't be considered a currency. Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff has said he doesn't see bitcoin succeeding and that it "could have some use in a dystopian future.
At the time of writing, bitcoin has been declared "dead" in mainstream media times. Despite the scores of times various personalities and publications have pronounced it dead, the asset continues to rise in value and get adopted by major Wall Street institutions.
Bitcoin's "death" can be tracked at Bitcoin Obituary , a parody website that collates news articles and blogs.