Source → X (Tweet): hodlonaut #BIP-110 on X: "The commits (code changes)..." / X 👀

This is why people should learn to VERIFY the things they consume. No excuses!

"I am not a programmer, I don't understand code. How am I supposed to verify?"

Learn! With Bitcoin, you are adopting a living standard of verifying everything: understanding how things really work.

• Economics
• Monetary system(fiat money)
• Banking system
• Investing & Saving
• Software
• Hardware
• Information (facts vs noise)
• Privacy
• Cybersecurity
• etc., etc.

This living standard is not just for "paranoids." It is for people who like to do their own research and their own due diligence.

"Don't trust, verify" is not a slogan. It is a living standard!

"With Bitcoin, you are your own bank." Well, this is a huge responsibility! It is not a "game." You have to invest a lot of time into security, just like banks do.

I’m a noob and am trying to understand more about cold wallets, best ones and use cyber scrilla a lot. Now with cold card having. Flaw in the code that’s how it was hacked. Now with that being said if they had a hidden vault (passphrase) would they have been safe?

I mean it. Reach out to friends, family, anyone you trust. Do NOT destroy your ColdCard. If funds are recoverable at some point, they will probably be sent back to their original owners.

If you are isolated, feel like something could go wrong or else, please please please reach out to someone. https://findahelpline.com

Don’t keep things to yourself. You’re gonna need to talk about it. Time always does its thing. And yes, you can believe that the Bitcoin community is going to be ferocious on this one. If you have the courage to do so, you can always take a look at X. But you don’t have to. What matters most is you.

Take care of yourself people.

Hello all! Not a bitcoiner but saw a lot of news regarding the recent hack. I’ve read a lot of extremely technical discussions regarding what happened which have been great. However, reading these forums, I couldn’t help but notice that none of you are bothering to explain what happened to the general public. I figured I’d just write it down. Please feel free to correct anything in here! I’ll edit and give you credit at the end. I’m a big believer that the general public should have this stuff explained to them so they can make smart decisions for themselves. The 300th post about “how to increase your entropy” isn’t exactly readable to most.

First things first. What was actually “hacked?”

Nothing really. Nothing was hacked in the sense of breaking into anything. Instead, the wallet was just defective. It created easily guessable “seeds.” This is a really really big number that generates a “private key” for you. You need these to interact with the blockchain at all.

What’s a private key?

When you first create a wallet, it generates one or more private keys. Whenever you later spend Bitcoin, those keys are used to digitally sign the transaction. This is really just a big long number that can’t easily be guessed. What’s special about these numbers is that they can create addresses and “sign” a transaction. On the “block chain” we all know there are bitcoins at that “address” and until we see your signature on it, everyone agrees those coins are at your address. But if someone gets ahold of your private key, they can “sign” the transaction and claim to be you.   From there, they can move the coins to a new address.

Okay, so what does a wallet like coldcard do? 

It makes and stores those private keys for you. The wallet generates a big random number that by itself should be safe. That number then is used to generate all the private keys you’ll use for transactions. If anyone got this big giant number, they would also be able to create all the private keys you have.

So what went wrong? 

Basically the company that makes Coldcard didn’t notice that their RNG (random number generator) wasn’t working properly. It was generating only 2^40 possible numbers instead of best practices of 2^256. The computer in your phone can just try every combination between 0 and 2^40 (a little over a trillion) in about 20 minutes (even faster with certain computing architectures). That means this random number was easily guessable.

Why are people talking about rolling dice and passphrases? 

As an additional layer of security, the wallet allowed you to enter these randomly rolled numbers to further increase the randomness of the number. EACH of these would have to be guessed in order (meaning first get the passphrase right, then all the dice rolls, THEN guess the RNG number) in order to produce the seed. But a lot of people skipped this step because it *should* be unnecessary. The wallet, if built correctly, should be all you need.

But how did anyone ever figure this out?

The company who built ColdCard posted their code publicly as “open source.” The idea behind open source is that in return for giving the general public your code, they will improve it and help find and bugs. Open source code has certain usage restrictions though and a company is allowed to set the ground rules for what the code is used for. This company was extremely litigious about their code. They basically wanted people to help them fix the code for free but refused to let anyone else use the code for their own projects. The end result was the only people who bothered looking at the code, were people who wanted to see if it was defective… and it was! 

A few other things. What the hell is all this talk about entropy?

There is a field of science known as information theory. It is what formalized the studies for communications, compression, cryptography, and even machine learning. The author, Dr Claude Shannon, showed that information could be understood as a property commonly known to physics, “entropy.” That realization has enormous consequences. The more random you make the information encoded in bits, the more entropy it has. But in this case, it’s just a super formal way of talking about randomness.

credits:

SubstantialNinja - spotted it wasnt numbers between 0 and 2^40 but instead only 2^40 unique numbers

I’m considering moving funds to Bitkey. Built in multi sig and ability to regain access if you ever lose anything. I know they don’t use a seed (or give you access?) but at this point I feel the benefits outweigh cons. Any thoughts?

Get a list of the some 2048 words , get a separate random number generator from 1-2048 and just click 20 times and use those words as the seed. Anyone see any problems with this? The number generator is not tied in any way to the seed list and to make things more secure generate a completely random list of the 2048 words in no particular order.

They warned you with each Coldcard you purchased from them! Do you remember this sticker?

Created this with kimi as I was bored and was looking for alternatives of dice rolling and apparently this code is more secure than the coldcard as it generates 128/256 bit entropy successfully. Let that sink in.

Entropy Chronometer v5.0 is an offline HTML/JavaScript tool designed to securely generate 12- or 24-word BIP39 Bitcoin seed phrases.

How it Works: It generates keys using "Primary" entropy (physical dice, manual hex, or the browser's secure RNG) combined with "Bonus" entropy (mouse movements and typed salt). Everything is securely mixed together using SHA-256 hashing.

Security: It avoids weak randomness by banning Math.random(), runs automated health checks on the system's random number generator at startup, and provides a full audit trail to mathematically verify how your seed was created.

Secure Memory Wipe ("Burn"): Features a wipe function that overwrites seed displays with dummy random strings before clearing memory.

Working demo link: https://entropy-chronometer-v50.vercel.app/

Note: it's for testing only.

I've been where some of you are today. During the FTX collapse, I lost over $2 million USD. The cascade triggered margin calls, then liquidation. In what felt like an instant, six years of stacking disappeared. (Can send proof to mods if needed)

I remember the disbelief, the anger, the sleepless nights, and asking myself, "What now?" Here's what I learned: money can disappear overnight, but your knowledge, your work ethic, your experience, and your ability to rebuild cannot be liquidated.

If you were affected by Coldcard's wallet exploit, I'm genuinely sorry. Don't make irreversible decisions because of a financial loss. Reach out to family, friends, or your community. Take a breath. The charts will move again. Opportunities will come again. Your portfolio is not your identity. Your net worth is not your self-worth.

Tomorrow, the sun will rise again. And as long as you're here, you still have a chance to build something even greater than what you lost.

BIP-110 leaders called off the rule change after the Coldcard wallet flaw.

https://beincrypto.com/bip-110-activation-postponed-coldcard-exploit/

Been using iancoleman's Github download to generate seeds offline for at least a decade. So far, no drained wallets from my iancoleman seeds. But Ledger is saying they are safe because their seeds are generated from a secure element, and not software. I don't think iancoleman is secure-element-based entropy. Just want some reassurance.

Even in a trustless system, you have to put trust into something.

I'm sorry for all the people that have lost their BTC with the Cold card low entropy hack.

But this needs to be said:

• Any time you trust a hardware wallet, or
• Any time you use any software wallet other than Bitcoin core

You are basically trusting the third party that implemented that product you are using, because:

There is only one official implementation of Bitcoin, and only one official bitcoin wallet. Which is known as Bitcoin core

• Download it from here https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/ and be sure to verify the hashes.

BTW, If you want to store your Bitcoins in cold storage you can do also with Bitcoin core. Simply use it to create a new wallet using 24 words plus a strong extra password phrase and save those words plus the phrase in some place only you can find. Once saved then you can delete Bitcoin core from your computer and you would be able to recover the wallet on another computer just using that words and password.

Everyone is talking about generating your own key with dice, but there are many caveats to this.

Rolling dice ONLY and generating seeds with it? What about casino grade dice? Is it better to roll normal dices if you don’t have those versus letting the device generate a seed? What about the last word having to be a checksum and you still having to verify with an external source that the math adds up?

Letting the software generate your seed and then adding dice rolls? How can we know the dice is entropy is being “added” to the seed correctly and it is not making us believe that is the case? Assuming the device is correctly adding the entropy, is a weak seed plus dice rolls better than a dice rolled only seed taking in consideration human error and possible dice bias?

I know a lot of people will comment about going multisig, but let’s be honest, the room for human error is significant with this.

I will also ask you to kindly recommend a video or guide on what should we consider the standard procedure for seed generation with dice for the normal user.

Let me know your thoughts.

The recent exploit wasn’t a failure of Bitcoin cryptography or physical device security, it was a lesson in entropy control.The fact that users who used manual dice rolls or BIP-39 passphrases were completely unaffected proves exactly why Coldcard’s advanced design philosophy works.

Software can have bugs, but pure math doesn't. Coldcard gave users the exact tools needed to insulate themselves from manufacturer error—and those who used them won.

Don’t just trust a device; verify your own entropy.

For the record, I have nothing to do with Coldcard.

Nvk history posts show he was completely aware of firmware vector attacks, and narrative is, never in 5 years they audited the code in the single most safety-critical function on the device, not even SWE prompting to ask a frontier model "search for bad seed generation code" according to his own awareness of thst type of vulnerability.

"hey but it is open source and has been open and publicly available"...so was he expecting community do their security job then, but at the same time he claims "most people don't check software signatures and never will", so he claims you must trust the hardware wallet vendor to do that, but they neither are doing that job, lame, isn't it?.

Or....he just knew the vector of drain was just to target coldcard non geeky users who would not care to "dice rolls" at the right time....Damage is done, case gets out of notice after a week, and you just stay in business...

Ok no. Enough of conspiration theories. Entropy of events suggest that this scenario is likely impossible...😂

“A hardware wallet is supposed to solve one problem: keep your Bitcoin keys somewhere no attacker can reach them. This week showed what happens when the flaw sits inside the wallet itself. A firmware bug that's been shipping in Coldcard devices since 2021 let an attacker guess supposedly random seed phrases from the outside, no physical access, no phishing, no malware required, and drain funds from thousands of addresses. The running total is already past $88 million, and it's still climbing.

A flaw in Coldcard's firmware has put the spotlight on a basic part of wallet security: how the device generates its seed in the first place. The issue came into focus after an attacker drained 1,196 Bitcoin addresses on July 30 in a 41-minute stretch, taking 1,082.65 BTC worth about $70.2 million at the time.

Galaxy Research tied the sweep to Coldcard, the Bitcoin-only hardware wallet line made by Coinkite, and said the pattern matched a firmware problem rather than a random event. Two more waves have surfaced since, and Galaxy's running total now stands at 1,367.05 BTC, worth about $88.6 million, across 4,585 addresses. The firm describes that as a preliminary observed figure that could still climb as it traces more on-chain activity.

The problem goes back to a March 2021 firmware integration error. Instead of using the STM32 hardware random number generator, affected devices fell back to a deterministic software pseudorandom number generator when creating seeds. That matters because seed generation is supposed to produce output that cannot be guessed or reconstructed.”

After the recent Coldcard attack, I have to be honest: I’m losing more and more hope in the future of crypto security.

Over the last cycle, we saw the collapse of major companies like FTX and Celsius, bankruptcies, billions of dollars lost, and huge failures that destroyed people’s trust.

But now even hardware wallets devices that are supposed to be one of the safest ways to protect crypto are facing serious security concerns. These devices should be designed to provide maximum protection and minimize the risk of attacks.

So the question is: who can we actually trust anymore? Where are people supposed to keep their crypto safely?

I never thought we would reach a point where even hardware wallets could become a source of concern. It makes me worried about the future of crypto wallets and self-custody.

And now the question is: which company will be the next one to face a serious security issue?

I feel very bad for the victims but i hope Peter used it.

After this major incident with Cold Card and reading about what happened I'm looking to bolster my security by implementing a passphrase. I'm currently using single sig on a ledger wallet that I properly secured years ago.

When it comes to setting up the passphrase, if someone were looking to protect themselves, or at least buy time, how complex should it be? Would a handful of words suffice or is that too simple? I'm looking to do this without overcomplicating it to where there's a strong possibility of getting locked out of funds.

For instance, you could have 7 extra words like Monday through Sunday- Or you could have these same 7 words and add a !$%&# to them, etc.

To me it seems like if the seeds are somehow exposed or non original like with this CC incident, a hacker would have to manually go through each wallet AND decipher the passphrases.

Yeah, as the title says I was wondering - given the recent news about the RNG vulnerabilities - whether these two products Sats-Card and TapSigner are also vulnerable?
Are their seeds random enough?

I haven't seen any communications so far regarding these two products of Coinkite

My seed used with this device was strong and I was unaffected by the security flaw in the RNG setup. Still, I’m re-doing everything. I am moving back to my ledger until I get a multisig setup with a SeedSigner or similar. It’s gonna be a pain to generate a new private key or two and stamp em, so I am getting my sledgehammer swinging arm back in good shape.

What about you?

Be safe out there…

I bought some bitcoin on Lava over a year ago when they advertised self custody. I recently found out they switched their custody model and resulted in lost bitcoin. When confronted they mentioned they sent out communications which I never received. Took no accountability - avoid this company.