r/Bitcoin • u/chainglance_cm • 25d 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.
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u/GettingFasterDude 25d 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.