Podcast Corner: Bitcoin mystery with €215m at stake provides fodder for two new shows
Bitcoin is at the heart of several interesting podcasts.
Gerald Cotten was 30 when he died on his honeymoon in India in autumn 2018. He and his wife Jennifer were planning on visiting an orphanage they had sponsored, but Cotten, who had a history of Crohn’s disease, would be pronounced dead within 24 hours of arriving in Jaipur, having suffered stomach pains and then cardiac arrest.
Cotten had helped co-found the largest bitcoin exchange in Canada, Quadriga CX; when he died, it had 65,000 customers with $215m stored in accounts. He was also the only full-time employee of the company - and the only person who knew the password to the cryptocurrency.
It’s a juicy, compelling story that’s so interesting it’s the subject of not one but two new series, Exit Scam and A Death in Cryptoland - you wait ages for a bus, etc, etc. The former is written and presented by Aaron Lammer, who previously hosted a bitcoin podcast that covered the ongoing Quadriga controversy; the latter is by Takara Small and from CBC - the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. They’re both two or three episodes into their respective series. For what it’s worth, Exit Scam was first out of the traps.
It turns out Cotten was pronounced dead and embalmed rather quickly, his funeral taking place 36 days before the news is posted to Quadriga’s website. Soon his widow has made some rather expensive purchases and it’s discovered by online sleuths that they had set up a $100,000 trust fund for their two chihuahuas.
Both podcasts work off the same material and reveal the same tantalising titbits, like how there was no dead man switch enacted on Cotten’s death that would have revealed the password to the exchange. They use the same audio from the same YouTube clips that went viral as the realisation dawned on Quadriga customers that it was facing bankruptcy. They both detail conversations they’ve had with Cotten’s friends, who didn’t want to go on record. They both note how relatively easy it is to consult with ‘death facilitators’ in India.
And both podcasts are really good - it’s just an unfortunate circumstance of timing that they have clashed like this. So take your pick for your next true crime hit.
The Bitcoin Hunter: Episode 115 of Reply All was a tech support special. New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino explains how she had bought bitcoin - and some drugs - about a decade ago but had left it in an online wallet and since forgotten the password. In the interim, the $80 or so that she had deposited could now be worth at least six figures, such has been the trajectory of the price of bitcoin. Can Reply All help her find her bitcoin? The payoff is sensational.
