The crypto factor: the winners and losers in virtual investment
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2019
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
You can't take money with you when you die.... or can you? In this episode of Assignment the stranger than fiction story that's the latest cryptocurrency scandal to leave tens of thousands of people out of pocket. The news about QuadrigaCX broke almost to the day that crypto-currencies celebrated a decade in existence. On this anniversary, we investigate the current state of the market and uncover how these sometimes tragic events have unfolded both here in the UK and across the world. With the UK government and other countries now considering attempting to regulate the market, we ask if these scandals could have been prevented and could now be avoided in the future.
Reporter: Paul Connolly Producer: Kate West Editor: Gail Champion
(Image: A broken Bitcoin. Credit: Reuters)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In January of this year, Bitcoin, the world's first cryptocurrency celebrated its 10th birthday. |
| 0:09.0 | Over the course of the last decades, the fortunes of cryptocurrencies have soared, then crashed, |
| 0:15.3 | leaving scandals, shattered dreams, and the suddenly super-rich in their wake. |
| 0:20.8 | I'm Paul Connolly, and for assignment this week week we're telling this story of a scandal involving |
| 0:26.0 | over a hundred million dollars disappearing from Canada's biggest cryptocurrency exchange. |
| 0:31.5 | It's a mystery. cryptocurrency exchange. |
| 0:38.0 | It's a mystery that's caused consternation and mass confusion for those left penniless, |
| 0:40.0 | and for those tasked with locating the missing millions. |
| 0:43.2 | Does that say what I think it just said? |
| 0:45.9 | You can't get the money, their password's gone, nobody else had the password? |
| 0:50.5 | It's very interesting, the whole story of it is like a who-done it. Welcome back now to this cryptocurrency mystery investors are looking for |
| 1:07.0 | answers. Canada's largest |
| 1:08.8 | cryptocurrency exchange is in hot water and Gerald Cotton he's the founder of Quadriga CX the problem |
| 1:16.2 | here is also access to his laptop. |
| 1:18.8 | At the beginning of this year, Quadriga CX, a cryptocurrency exchange based in Canada, suffered a dramatic collapse, leading |
| 1:26.9 | more than 115,000 customers out of pocket. |
| 1:31.8 | The story of how that came to pass is a complicated one, but this just |
| 1:36.8 | about sums it up. There was this one guy on a laptop and he was the only person |
| 1:41.1 | that had access to hundreds of millions of dollars |
| 1:43.7 | and everything's gone, right? It's like 180 million dollars has just |
| 1:48.9 | evaporated into thin air. That's Amy Kaster, a cryptocurrency writer based in Boston, Massachusetts. |
| 1:55.8 | Amy has been tracking and unraveling the Quadriguez story since day one. |
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