Travails of keeping everything only unto yourselves in your memory

On the face of it, what Todd Henry tells us why we should pass on good ideas we may have in our mind instead of keeping them only unto ourselves in his book “Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day” is like a feast delivered to us on a platter.

The fact is – I am inspired more by what should have motivated him to have written this book than what he has written in the book.

The story that goes behind what should have motivated him to write such a book

As is believed, he got motivated to write this book when he attended a business meeting, in which the CEO of the company had asked the audience – where is the richest land in the world.

To which, one of the participants said, “Oil-rich Gulf states.”

Another participant answered, “Diamond mines in Africa.”

Yet another participant responded, “America is the richest land since it has the maximum number of billionaires in the world.”

But the director said, “No, it is the Cemetery”, supporting his reply by telling that it is the richest land in the world since millions of people lying inside the graves carried with them many valuable ideas they had in their mind, instead of having left them behind.

He took an inspiration to write this book from what this man told them toward the end, “It is all in the cemetery where they are buried” – with the sole objective of motivating people to pour out their ideas and potential energies in their communities and turn them into something useful before it was too late by remarking, “Do not go to your grave carrying inside you the best that you have. Aim to Die Empty.”

The book purports to pass on the message that we should aim to deliver whatever calibre we have in us to the world, before we leave for the grave much the same what a prophet had sermonised, “If the Final Hour comes upon one of you while he has in his hand a sapling, then – let him plant it.”

So, if we have any useful idea in our mind, we should let it be known to the world instead of carrying it to our grave with us.

But the world is not limited to only good ideas we may have with us.

The consequences of holding everything unto only ourselves may be far more horrendous than what you may be, probably, even aware of.

Though he has warned that the good ideas we may hold in our memory may not benefit anyone if we carried them straight to our grave without passing them on to anyone in his book, just watch out – it can make others even bankrupt (or quasi-bankrupt), if we don’t let out of our mind the “passwords” that are known only to us – none else, as has happened in the case of the Canadian Crypto-currency Exchange Quadriga”, consequent upon the death of its founder, since all these “passwords” happened to be only his “preserve” – none else.

Recent case of bankruptcy of the Canadian Crypto-currency Exchange “Quadriga”

Crypto-currencies are attractive to people who want to make illegal purchases on the Dark Web – the part of the internet that is not indexed by search engines.

Well, though everyone may not be using the Bitcoins, as this currency is widely known as, by and large, everybody is aware of the use of such currencies.

Of course, Bitcoins are not any of such coins as are shown in the following photograph.

Bitcoins do not have any physical backing.

They are just a “digital token” that can be sent electronically from one user to another, anywhere in the world.

Bitcoins first took off in 2011 after drug dealers began taking payments in Bitcoins on the black-market website known as the Silk Road. Although the Silk Road was shut down in 2013, similar sites popped up to replace it since then, to meet the demand.

But the bitcoin-transactions are not safe by any means.

It was not a solitary case that a flourishing Canadian crypto-currency exchange, Quadriga”, which had been founded by Gerald Cotten should have gone underground.

Prior to it, in 2014, the Tokyo based “Mt. Gox”, which happened to be one of the world’s biggest online crypto-currency exchanges – too, had unexpectedly shut down its shutters after losing 850,000 Bitcoins (valued at the time at nearly $0.4bn).

After its shut down, Quadriga” came as a  blessing for the Canadian investors, since it operated from within their own country.

But it watered down their all dreams when it came to be known that its founder, Gerald Cotton, met with his end on December 9, 2018, in Jaipur where he had gone to open an orphanage, from complications related to Crohn’s disease.

Not so, because of his sudden death but because he took with him the whereabouts of the investment to the tune of about C$ (Canadian dollars) 180m in crypto-currency to his grave leaving behind him thousands of Quadriga – CX customers, in the lurch – whether they will ever see their funds again.

Surprisingly, none of them ever bothered to know that this Exchange did not have any offices, nor had any employees and even any bank-accounts worth the salt, though it used some third-party contractors to handle some of the additional work, including payment processing.

It was just a one-man band run entirely by Cotten himself from his own home in Fall River, Nova Scotia just on his laptop and only he knew the “passwords” to operate their accounts.

In an affidavit, his widow, Jennifer Robertson has mentioned that she has searched their home through in and out and even other properties for business records related to Quadriga but to no avail declaring that the laptop, on which he conducted all the business, is encrypted and she doesn’t have the password or the recovery-key to access any data posted on it.

So the death of Cotten has turned into a nightmare for all the investors more so because even the investigator, who had been hired to assist in recovering any records, has also raised his hands. He has not met with any success to recover any passwords because everything that is recorded on the laptop has been written in an encrypted form though IBC has frozen five accounts containing about Canadian $26m linked to Quadriga’s payment processor in a dispute over the real owners of the funds, an issue that ended up in court.

Alex Salkeld, a close friend of Cotten, has also admitted that he should have had a contingency plan in place.

There are many of them who are suspicious of Quadriga’s story and who doubt the claims that Cotten alone must have had the key to the reserves valued in tens of millions of dollars or even whether Cotten may not have faked his death to subvert their funds.

The tragedy is, even if Cotten gets reborn – no one knows whether he would be able to recall the passwords or the encryption key on his rebirth and even if he could – whether he may take the trouble of informing the courts that he could tell them what passwords and the encryption key, he should have used for each one of them. 

This gets us to the earthly truth that we should judge what we should hold only unto ourselves, what we should dispense away by telling others and what we should keep a back up of – to ward off a situation that may flounder everyone like this.

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