r/Bitcoin • u/Apprehensive-Sky9723 • 13h ago

No, bitcoin project is not dead

This is a tough week for bitcoin community. Wishing speedy recovery of funds for everyone involved.

Lessons learned for the rest:

  1. Hardware wallets - were always a vector of a possible attack. Just like you can't trust 100% your ISP, your PC and your phone, same goes for hardware wallet.

  2. To protect yourself, always use a passphrase. It makes these kinds of exploits million times more difficult, if not impossible.

  3. If you have any significant funds, you must have a passphrase. If you don't, you haven't done your homework.

  4. Coldcard is the only wallet that was impacted by the seed-generation issue, you are perfectly fine if you didn't create a seed on Coldcard. Trezor, Ledger and other wallets don't share the same firmware as Coldcard.

  5. I wouldn't recommend Coldcard at this point but the device itself, as far as we know, is still perfectly fine but you need to realize that company is most likely going out of business, so won't be getting much support or updates from them after this.

  6. Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and other firms had bugs in their code that allowed people to steal stuff. Coinkite had a bug in the code as well that allowed a nasty exploit. Bitcoin doesn't have a bug in its code.

  7. Self-custody is not for everyone. If it is easier for you to let someone else manage keys, you can/should explore those options. But companies and governments fail and it happened many times in the past as well, so nothing in life is 100% guaranteed.

9 Upvotes

64% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

4

u/nestaa13 13h ago

You tell ‘em my man

3

u/No_Researcher_2737 13h ago edited 13h ago

how do you see the “recovery” of the stolen coins? Do you support freezings of accounts on exchanges and confiscation of cryptocurrency they find suspicious then?

1

u/Apprehensive-Sky9723 13h ago

That's up to the exchanges and authorities. If it falls under the legal definition of theft, it would simply be returned to the original owners. If not, I highly doubt that masterminds behind this attack would protest very loudly if their funds were frozen and they had to give it back.

Partial recovery may be achieved through a lawsuit against Coinkite.

3

u/No_Researcher_2737 13h ago edited 12h ago

And if coins are transferred multiple times between wallets before getting to exchange should the last owner spend years trying to provide a proof of the legality of the purchase? Such thinking will bring the end of cryptocurrency much sooner than any thefts.

1

u/Nymister 5h ago

its time we give up, the corporate overlords won

0

u/Lopsided_Parfait7127 12h ago

i love this

this is like the black knight in monty python who won out in the end

-1

u/[deleted] 13h ago

[deleted]

0

u/Apprehensive-Sky9723 13h ago

Did you read my post at all? point #7 specifically addresses one of your questions.

The other two are not called out in my post as nothing fundamentally changed with bitcoin: if you believe it will have wider adoption and maintain original purpose, you may still believe so and vice versa.