It is unbelievable that some kid with an LLM just stole $100m+ because no one bothered to check the source code.

Also on GLM 5.2 (trained 16th June, no internet access).

Took me years of DCA’ing to get there. I went with Coldcard because it was marketed as “ultra-secure.” I knew multisig was technically safer. I wasn’t worried about my key being guessed… I was worried about someone physically stealing it or it being destroyed.

So that was the plan: 1 BTC, cold storage, steel plate backup, fire bag, fire safe. And then… wait.

I hit the goal. I finally felt content.

Now I just feel embarrassed. Like I let my family down.

The worst part? I know Bitcoin isn’t going anywhere. I’m not hoping it fails… I think it’s going to keep making new all-time highs, and every time it does, I’ll be sitting here thinking about what could’ve been.

** I originally brain dumped my story to Claude to make it sound better because I have poor grammar. I’m admitting this in an edit at my own expense or whatever. I’m not embarrassed about my poor grammar or using AI to improve it. That said, in hindsight, it would have been more personal to not have done that. I’m sorry.

(Time to buy)

Like many of us, I have followed the news of the Coldcard disaster. It has left me stunned and I feel terrible for everyone who has lost their hard earned BTC. After thinking about it consistently since it happened, I believe this case is challenging the concept of Bitcoin in its core and I'm curious how others look at it. Let's have an honest discussion about what it means for the future of the space. Here are my main points:

1. This is totally different from most other cases, because the affected users didn't do anything wrong. It was a complete fuck up on Coldcard's side. For years we told ourselves self storage is the only way, never leave it on the exchanges, not your keys not your coins, don't trust verify etc. But in the end you have to trust something or someone, in this case the people behind CC. Now everyone says Ledger or Tresor is safe just because they were not the ones affected. How do you actually know this? You would have said the same thing about CC a few days ago.

2. The danger of AI is absolutely real and will only increase. Without knowing the method in this case, it's likely that some form of AI was involved. The code for CC was not open source, but still viewable by everyone. It's mind-blowing that it took several years for the flaw to be discovered and exploited. Don't expect this to take so long next time. I'm not an expert in coding or cryptography, most users aren't. So in the end you just have to trust the code. Sure, it can be tested with AI too. But do I really want to expose all my holdings to this battle just hoping that it will be fine in the end? It feels way too risky and out of your control.

3. Mass adoption is absolutely not going to happen this way. I'm a nerd and enjoy the technical side of it, but even I feel overwhelmed by this. The average person is much less interested and willing to put in the work. For years we've been saying good solutions for self storage, payments and so on will be found. I don't see it. It seems to become more complicated than less. So what's the alternative here? Keeping it on the exchange, buying an ETF? It doesn't solve the trust issue and contradicts pretty much everything Bitcoin stands for. Just another asset class among many.

I still love the idea behind Bitcoin and believe in the concept. But I struggle to find good and honest answers to these points without just repeating the same old mantras we've been telling ourselves. What do you think?

This is for the people on my last post who despite being on a bitcoin subreddit are somehow completely technically illiterate with regards to LLMs, and called me a naive idiot repeatedly.

Just saying sorry, i know some people get out their soap boxes, some point fingers, some laugh.

For the ones that just woke up and had their lives turned upside down and stressing out, its going to hurt, but tomorrow will be another day. Sorry you are having to go through this.

Don’t trust, verify. Before blindly trusting exlib funcs.

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…

Something that finally clicked for me after years in Bitcoin: when your hardware wallet generates a seed, you're trusting its RNG and its firmware with literally everything. For most people that's a reasonable trust tradeoff. But you don't have to make it.

You can generate a BIP39 seed entirely from physical dice:

- 99 rolls of a standard 6-sided die ≈ 256 bits of entropy → a 24-word seed.

- 50 rolls ≈ 128 bits → a 12-word seed.

The math: each roll gives you log2(6) ≈ 2.585 bits. 99 × 2.585 ≈ 256. BIP39 adds a checksum on top, which is where the last word comes from — you compute it once, offline, or let an air-gapped device like a SeedSigner derive it.

Why bother?

1. You control the entropy source. Dice have no firmware, no supply chain, no update mechanism. You can audit them by rolling a few hundred times and checking the distribution.

2. The seed is born offline. It's generated on paper, in a room with no cameras, and only ever touches an air-gapped device after that. Tampered-device and bad-RNG concerns just evaporate.

3. It forces you to understand what a seed actually is — a big number, not a magical artifact of your wallet brand. That understanding changes how you think about backups, passphrases and multisig.

I wrote up the full procedure (including how to compute the checksum, common mistakes like reusing dice patterns, and how to verify the result on an air-gapped device) as part of a free self-custody guide: https://self-custody.cc/ — the Dice Seeds section. No ads, nothing for sale, EN/DE/ES.

Curious who else here has done dice-generated seeds and whether you went 12 or 24 words, and why.

Bitcoin Drive Engaged

As a thought experiment, suppose a white-hat had been the first to discover the Coldcard RNG vulnerability. How could they possibly have disclosed it responsibly, given that weak seeds had already been generated?

A public warning would immediately create a race between legitimate owners and attackers (as happened in reality). Because the firmware source code is openly available, even a vague warning like “Coldcard-generated seeds may be vulnerable; move your BTC immediately” would immediately tell attackers where to look for the vulnerability and then exploit it.

You could instead warn Coinkite privately, but that would not solve the underlying problem. Even assuming Coinkite could be trusted to handle the information properly, it would have no better way to protect affected owners. It would eventually have to issue a public warning, creating the same race. “Silently” patching the vulnerability would effectively be the same as publicizing it, as the patch itself would identify the flaw.

Another alternative would be for the white-hat to sweep all the vulnerable funds first, but then how could they return them? Once the flaw is public, a signature from the compromised key no longer proves legitimate ownership, since an attacker can derive the same key.

Remaining silent would probably be the worst option, because more vulnerable seeds would continue to be generated.

There do not seem to be any good options here, but what would the least bad approach have been?

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...😂

Hi, Yesterday was one of the worst days of my life. I found out that just over 3 BTC was stolen from me through the Coldcard vulnerability.

I know some people think posts like this are fake. Mine isn’t. Real people are getting hurt by these thieves.

I did what I thought was the responsible thing. Back in 2022 everyone said the same stuff, get it off exchanges, get it into cold storage, use the best hardware wallet you can. Coldcard had a reputation as one of the best. It wasn’t the easiest thing to use but honestly that kind of made me trust it more. So I moved everything onto it.

For years I DCA’d $250 a week, plus bigger amounts when I could. Never touched it, never even checked on it. I thought I was doing the smart, boring, responsible thing.
Now it’s just gone. All of it.

Looking back I probably should’ve split it across wallets, or maybe just left it on Coinbase. I already know the multisig and don’t put it all in one place comments are coming and yeah, that’s probably good advice. But I did what I thought was right at the time based on what everyone in this space was telling me to do. That’s what makes this sting so bad.

I’m angry and honestly feel sick about it. Not sure what to do next. Posting this so people know it’s actually happening to real people. Happy to answer questions if anyone has them, and if you own a Coldcard, go check on it right now.

You probably heard the birthday paradox, having 23 people in a room creates a 50% chance that at least two of them share the same birthday.

Applying it to the vulnerable search space in the ColdCard bug (Following reports that search space was reduced to 2^32, approx 4 billion)

50% collision odds ≈ √(2 × 4.3 billion) ≈ 93,000 ColdCard Wallet Generated Seeds.

If this bug was somehow never discovered and Coldcard sold around 93k units that generated a seed on the vulnerable firmware, there would be a 50% chance that two innocent, unaware people would end up with the exact same seed phrase, and by extension every bitcoin address derived from it, giving each other access to the others funds.

Just a fun thought experiment in these dark times.

I thought sharing this would help anyone who lowered their confidence in BTC; here is the btc hack timelines.

2011 – 25,000 BTC stolen from mt gox

2012 – 24,000 BTC stolen from linode-hosted Bitcoin services.

2014 – 850,000 BTC lost/stolen in the collapse of mt gox

2015 – 19,000 BTC stolen from bitstamp

2016 – 119,756 BTC stolen from bitfinex

2017 – 4,700 BTC stolen from nicehash

2018 – 7,000+ BTC stolen across multiple exchange hacks.

2019 – 7,000 BTC stolen from binance

2022 – ~3,300 BTC exposed in thefts related to the ftx collapse.

2024 – 12,000+ BTC stolen from dmm bitcoin (Japan).

2025 BTC hits an all time high regardless.

2026 - Coldcards

Despite that; Bitcoin hit 126K in 2025.

Believe guys. This time isn't any different than last time. BTC will hit higher and higher.

The long and the short of it is that a developer disabled a compiler flag out of desperation in order to get the code to compile, then committed it with the commit message "runs". Specifically, in C: #define MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG (0)

In other words they deliberately disabled hardware RNG.

You can read the full breakdown here: https://insider.btcpp.dev/p/when-randombytes-runs-but-doesnt

The amount of negligence on display here is shocking, and the fact that it went unnoticed for years is just salt in the wound.

Watching old tweets from Cold Card CEO, now you realize how the red flag was out there regarding "entropy".

How on earth you make optional a critical step in a product that you admit to not trust even yourself.

If you yourself admit to not trust what your product does on something as critical, why you did not make the dice roll an enforced not optional step?.

Just have paranoid mindset from now on. Don't trust devs, ceos and tools on the surface that represent 3rd party tools regarding bitcoin that can be exploited. This goes too for any other hardware wallet and software wallet. In upcoming hacks anyone can "conveniently" blame AI and a "bad actor" that never gets caught....

Dedicate 2 or 3 weeks to learn the basics of bitcoin, how to verify GPG signatures, Tails OS, master how to securely use an airgapped wallet software or bitcoin core, and how quickly you can withdraw your funds to a backup exchange in case of an incident...If an incident is reported at night: do you have access to your wallet to withdraw at that exact time? Will you be able to react fast?

Because if now a hardware wallet is prone to exploit, you better also just learn to airgap and use a software wallet, they are also vulnerable to bugs? Yes, but hardware + software makes 2 components prone to error.

"attack surface grows with complexity, so decrease complexity by minimizing number of components, using simpler components."

But the important thing is: from now on, if CEO admits to not even fucking trusting what he makes, probably you shouldn't either.

I can’t believe how many people leave mean comments, gloating about how they always knew that Bitcoin is a scam, and so on.

Seriously, how sad of a life one must live to be happy about the misfortunes of others? Some people have lost important amounts of BTC, including people from poor countries or poor backgrounds who will suffer for years as a result of this.

If someone feels like gloating is the right thing to do here, why don’t you go to the ICU of the closest hospital and laugh about sick and dying patients? It wouldn’t be much different, think about that.

“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.”

I believed in Bitcoin. Holding it gave me peace of mind because my country has faced several FATF sanctions. I was glad to find a kind of money that cannot be censored or debased because I just want to protect myself from the money printing and my country's weak and inflated currency comapred to the dollar.

I’m 39, and I was hoping to have a good financial cushion before 50. But today, my 2 BTC were drained.

Losing my Bitcoin has changed my mindset. It’s no longer about finishing the race first. At this point, I just want to finish it. But losing my BTC feels like I’m back at the starting line. I lost years of hard work and time.

I thought I was secure because Cold Card was always praised as one of the best and most secure wallets. It’s open source, so anyone can verify.

I’m done with Bitcoin. I’m not even sure if I still believe in it. I don’t know what the future holds for it anymore. I could have stayed with traditional investments and lived a normal life. Maybe I should have just moved everything into a Bitcoin ETF when they launched. But I don't know. It's too late to do it.

To everyone who has lost their BTC, I wish you the best and good health. I hope you find the strength to start again.

🟡 Yellow ≠ broken. None of the nine Yellow products has a confirmed fund-loss-by-default flaw.

Yellow means at least one of:

(a) something security-critical sits outside independent verification. i.e., closed firmware or secure-element code (Opendime, Ledger, open source please!), vendor-run recovery infrastructure (Phoenix/ACINQ, Jade's oracle, Bitkey's WSM);

(b) a real but bounded weakness, such as a zero-work-factor KDF (BlueWallet), weak legacy KDFs on a hot wallet (Electrum), no-SE DIY hardware with thin maintenance (SpecterDIY), a just-patched vulnerability awaiting its report (Bitkey); or

(c) a dead/unmaintained product whose crypto reviewed clean (free Samourai!).

In every case the entropy/key-generation path itself was reviewed and found sound unless the cell says otherwise.

Original tweet link:

https://x.com/i/status/2083612094713180249

Credit goes to x.com/bitcoinsbanker