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.
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