For a long time, cryptocurrency was seen as an unreliable coin for unreliable people, the shady domain of black market dealers and computer nerds with too many skin conditions to go outside and actually mine for gold. But it's almost 2020 for Pete's sake, even Starbucks takes Bitcoin now. So it's time to put our prejudices aside and accept cryptocurrency for the totally legit banking alternative that it is. All right? Good, now grab a shovel and help dig up this dead crypto CEO so he can give us our money back.

At the start of the year, cryptocurrency exchange company Quadriga CX announced the demise of its CEO Gerald Cotten during a trip to India. And with him, the demise of all his clients' money, since Cotten was the only person who knew the password to access their funds, taking the secret to unlock about a quarter billion dollars to his grave. So perhaps unsurprisingly, after a year of being unable to unlock their funds, the well-adjusted members of the cryptocurrency community are demanded to take him back out of said grave.

Given the highly suspicious circumstances of his death, Quadriga's former clients have petitioned through the Nova Scotia Supreme Court to have Cotten's corpse exhumed in "the need for certainty around the question of whether Mr. Cotten is in fact deceased." And while it may seem literally ghoulish to want to resurrect a manager to ask for your money back, recent revelations make it easy to understand why these former clients are paranoid. In fact, it's hard to determine which of them is more of a 'fake your death' cliche. Is it that the guy who died of a bowel condition took an extended trip to India of all places, a place that hands out death certificates free with every twelfth purchase of a cop? Or maybe that Cotten's company had "no basic corporate record," or that investigators discovered he had started embezzling money only months before his death? Or maybe it's just the weird trivia fact that his partner Michael Patryn (which is not even his real name) did time for identity theft and his widow, Jennifer Robertson, changed her name from being Jennifer Forgeron, a last name straight out of particularly easy to solve Hardy Boys adventure.

Simon & Schuster"Watch out Joe, that virgin has a katana!"

All that the Quadriga plaintiffs know is that, with that full a bingo card of bad film noir tropes, they're sure to get their exhumation. So sure they want to do it the moment the Canadian ground has thawed, setting a deadline for Spring 2020 to "given decomposition concerns" -- just in case it really is him and they can still make out a faded computer password written on his slowly shriveling hand.

For more weird tangents and cheap fake passports, follow Cedric on Twitter.

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Kalanuh

December 18th, 2019    •    18/12/19 • 9:31 am

I normally eschew these conspiracy theories, but I remember reading the early news articles about his death and thinking to myself. Yeah...yeah this doesn't add up. All I can say is that if there truly was no rip-off or conspiracy on this one, then Gerald did a real nice impression of one.

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CorruptUser

December 18th, 2019    •    18/12/19 • 11:13 am

In my opinion, if you purchase a currency that does not have the backing of a functioning government that is held accountable to the public in some fashion, you don't get to complain when you lose it all.

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Justin-Case

December 18th, 2019    •    18/12/19 • 11:17 am

And while they are at it, perhaps dig up Jim Morrison and Andy Kaufman to make sure they are in there.

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