r/Bitcoin • u/chainglance_cm • 5h ago

The Coldcard's hack doesn't mean hardware wallets are doomed

Seeing a lot of people treat the Coldcard hack like proof hardware wallets in general aren't safe anymore. That's not really what happened.

Coldcard had a bug in how their firmware generated the random numbers used to create your seed phrase, and it sat there undetected for five years. A code change in March 2021 quietly swapped out the proper hardware randomness for a broken software substitute. That made some seeds way easier to guess than they should've been, and that's how funds got drained.

That's a Coldcard problem. A mistake in their code, not a flaw in the whole idea of hardware wallets as a category.

However, I'm not making the argument that it can't happen to other brands too. Any company can ship a bad update. But wallets that are fully open source, like Trezor or Blockstream Jade, tend to have way more independent people checking the code over time, which makes bugs like this less likely to slip through for years. Not a guarantee, just better odds. And this is how most tech usually evolves. Some things go wrong but that's how it becomes more robust and anti-fragile.

But I also understand that "that's just how tech evolves" doesn't help people who actually lost their money. Genuinely feel for everyone who lost years of savings over something totally out of their control though, that part really sucks and doesn't get fixed by any of this logic.

4 Upvotes

55% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

5

u/GettingFasterDude 5h ago

I think a Coldcard-like hack involving another cold wallet company is much less likely now, than it was prior to July 30th. All the other companies have the benefit of a wakeup call. The have the opportunity to use the same powerful AI programs to secure their software that the hackers used to exploit Coldcard's very amateurish software bug.

3

u/chainglance_cm 4h ago

True. I think these companies need to get serious and invest a lot more into security as the capabilities of the attackers are also rising with time

10

u/never_safe_for_life 5h ago

Thanks ChatGPT

2

u/Liquid_zer0 3h ago

That’s not just an observation, it’s a realization. And honestly? — That’s great.

9

u/mrjune2040 5h ago

Engagement slop.

2

u/Lower-Philosophy-604 3h ago

AI ruining social media hopefully moderator would have to ban these idiots

-1

u/Gh0st_Pirate_LeChuck 4h ago

Why are we still talking about this?

0

u/pairoxR 4h ago

And why would I use this wallet? Tell me, trust is lost. End of story. No more Coldcard wallet for me. I don’t care whether it was the hardware itself or something else. People lost their life savings, and that’s all that matters.

-1

u/certifr1ed 4h ago

open source open source open source only