Because I knew so little about him and because I had no idea what really happened, I decided to start by trying to figure out, was this the kind of person who could pull something like this off?

But when I started looking into Gerald Cotton, this facade that he had built up as sort of an idealistic bitcoiner pretty

quickly fell apart. And we realized that he was involved in things before Quadriga

that might have given him some of the skills to do this stuff. And I'll spoiler episode

three a little bit here. He was involved in Ponzi schemes when he was a teenager that called high yield investment

programs technically.

He ran these starting at about 15 years old.

And the end of one of these schemes looks a lot like the end of Quadriga.

Knowing that he had been involved in this stuff really changed my opinion about

what he was capable of. He had been doing these dress rehearsals before. A lot of the things

that were going on at Quadriga weren't high tech. As I said, someone who was sufficiently

motivated could have discovered them on the blockchain, but they used techniques that go back hundreds of years in terms of it's really easy to collect money from people,

pay out high returns, and obscure the fact that you're actually paying new investors with money from old investors.

And I think when you have something like crypto, it attracts the same kind of people that were

attracted to early stock markets and early investment platforms.

It makes it easy to hide as a wolf among the sheep.

Welcome to Opinionated with Ben Schiller.

Ben is a features editor at Coin Desk.

He's a seasoned business journalist, and he'll be talking with some of the most fascinating contributors to Coin Desk daily opinion section.

Ben is joined by two CoinDest reporters. co-host Anna Batakova and Danny Nelson.

This episode is sponsored by Interpop and the Sun Exchange.

And just a reminder, CoinDesk is a news source and does not provide investment advice.

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