The CBC article doesn't go into enough details about Cotten's death, but it was almost certainly a fake too.<p>The Indian state which wrote his death certificate is apparently infamous for faking deaths in exchange for bribe money, e.g. for insurance fraud. Nobody saw the body. There was so much shady stuff that went down.
Do crypto enthusiasts just regard all this rampant fraud in the space as "just the cost of doing business" for all the other things they like about crypto?
>"The Quadriga cryptocurrency exchange that saw millions of dollars disappear just as its founder died was a "fraud" and Ponzi scheme, according to the Ontario Securities Commission."<p>There is one school of economic thought which says that all fiat currencies (including cryptocurrencies), and any asset which is a derivative of those things -- are ultimately all Ponzi schemes...<p>I'm not sure that I believe that, but, I do know the following:<p>First food had value, because you could eat it.<p>Then gold had value, because you could trade it for food.<p>Then dollars had value, because you could trade dollars for gold.<p>Then stock shares and cryptocurrencies had value, because you could trade them for dollars.<p>Then increasingly complex derivatives had value, because you could trade them for stock shares...<p>Perhaps all that we are really debating then, is what can be traded for what, when, and for how much, and will the transaction work or not?<p>If all of this comes down to a belief that something will be tradeable in the future for something else at a given valuation -- then wouldn't any future failure in the ability to make such a future expected transaction for the expected amount of future exchange -- be indicative of a Ponzi scheme (intentional, unintentional?), of one type or another?<p>Well, I for one wouldn't know.<p>It might make for an interesting debate among economic theorists, however...