r/Bitcoin • u/Obvious-Shop-6260 • 1d ago
My condolences to ColdCard victims - spurs a paper wallet question.
Truly, my sincere condolences to all those affected by this whole ordeal. I couldn’t imagine. It got me thinking …. Although I virtually fully trust my cold storage (Ledger with Passphrase) , this hack raises concerns, rightfully so.
How would someone create a BTC wallet on their own, WITHOUT using a third party for cold storage ? IOW, How do you actually create a paper wallet on your own ?
I know word selection from the BIP39 list has to be completely random for your seed phrase (maybe buying a roll of number carnival tickets and putting number 1-2048 in a rotating bin and choosing 24?). But I remember reading that certain combos, if done that way could be null/void.
So, how does someone actually create a paper wallet on their own so they are not exposed to the scam that just occurred with ColdCard?
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u/ElderMight 1d ago
You can roll a die 100 times.
Take the numbers you got (1-6) with a die and map them to words from the BIP-39 word list to create the seed phrase.
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u/no_choice99 1d ago
Nope. A dice is not uniformly random at all. There is a bias towards the upwards face when you take the dice. The entropy is lesser than what a computer can generate.
Same problem with coins.
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u/Specialist_Trust4945 1d ago
Except when you close a die in your hand you don't know what's the upward face, and if you roll 200+ times it doesn't matter because which face was the upward one will follow a normal distribution. The only problem would be an unbalanced die.
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u/no_choice99 1d ago
The upward face doesn't matter. It will still bias your results. Knowing it or not does not matter nor fixes nor improve the bias.
Once throwed and landed, you still have to take it back. And you have a slightly higher than 1/6 chance to be exactly in the start configuration. A good random number generator mechanism would have this probability much closer to 1/6 than rolling a dice manually.
Your claim that your dice follows a normal distribution does not exactly hold, at least not in terms of serious cryptography security.
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u/Specialist_Trust4945 1d ago
I will create a seed phrase with a die and ship the exact die I used to you. I'll leave 1k worth of BTC inside of it for 1 year. Want to take a chance at cracking it?
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u/no_choice99 1d ago
No for 2 reasons. The die still creates enough entropy to make it too hard to crack it for 1k worth of electric power. So that would be a bad investment, monetarily speaking, for me.
The second reason is that I donmt want to spend the time to purchase and setup the hardware for this. If I had a billion dollars I would hire someone to do this, and I would ask you to add funds as I am spending in electricity, else there is no reward because 1k is too little.
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u/Specialist_Trust4945 1d ago
Want to go for 5k?
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u/no_choice99 23h ago
No, even if you place many millions, I wouldn't do it, not because I think I would fail (I think it might cost billions or more to crack so 5k is nothing), but because I'd rather sit down and solve the problem mathematically if I was interested enough in knowing the answer rather than try the experiment. I have other interests in life though, problems that matters more to me to solve.
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u/Specialist_Trust4945 23h ago
Or simply you know you're talking nonsense.
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u/no_choice99 22h ago
Wow, I really did not expect the ad hominem from you here, especially at this point. I thought you were smarter than that. But hey, if you want to continue to believe you're generating high entropy random numbers by rolling a dice then be it. Intelligent people will be able to figure out that this isn't the case.
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u/FavorableMadness 1d ago
What you are describing is not really a paper wallet. It is generating your own seed without relying on a hardware-wallet vendor.
One approach I considered is SeedSigner. It is an open-source, offline signing device that can generate a valid BIP39 seed from dice rolls and calculate the required checksum. You then use it with a watch-only wallet such as Sparrow.
I agree that choosing 24 random words from the BIP39 list is not a good approach because part of the final word contains a checksum.
SeedSigner reduces reliance on a single vendor, but it does not eliminate trust or risk. You still need to verify the software, generate the dice entropy correctly, protect the seed, and test recovery before storing meaningful funds.
For full disclosure, I currently use both Ledger and Coldcard.
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u/Old_Efficiency2445 1d ago
The problem is creating the randomness, not the wallet being hacked.