It’s going to be borderline impossible to collect my thoughts, but I’ll try anyway. Like many others, I haven’t slept much since Friday. My mind (or my body, or my soul) will wake me up after 3-5h of sleep, no matter what I do. No matter how tired I am, or when I go to sleep, and so on.

The damage from the COLDCARD catastrophe is hard to measure. And I’m not necessarily talking about the financial damage, which will probably be in the hundreds of millions.

The main damage is psychological. And it’s hitting the people I care most about. My people. Bitcoiners.

This “hack” is not hitting gamblers, or traders, or shitcoiners, or NFT people, or other degenerates. It is hitting people who thought “I did everything right.” You get a reputable hardware wallet, you stamp your seed in steel, you do all the backup steps. You move everything you’ve humbly stacked so far into what you assumed was secure cold storage. You continue working, stacking sats as hard as you can. One year, two years, even five years pass. Maybe more, if you moved your stack to a newly bought coldcard. You did everything right. You wake up this past Friday, and everything is gone.

Holy fucking shit.

It’s hard to imagine a more brutal scenario.

---

But that’s just one aspect of this shit-show. I want to address another aspect, which is unrelated to financial loss. It is related to spiritual loss, if you will.

The opening talk¹ I gave a little over two weeks ago had the title “Building in the Spirit of Bitcoin.”

And that’s ultimately what I want to talk about, because I feel like that is what was betrayed: the spirit of Bitcoin.

Being open source means anyone can independently review the code. If it was closed source, nobody could verify the security. I think it’s essential for a program of this nature to be open source.

Satoshi Nakamoto

Satoshi said it himself: security requires openness. No openness, no security.

Yes, the code was source-viewable, but still: the original sin of Coinkite was moving away from free and open-source software. There were many other sins, to be sure, but this is what introduced the vulnerability that is currently being exploited.

And what a vulnerability it is. Bad seeds. Poisoned seeds. Absolutely biblical, in the worst way possible.

As I’ve said above, it’s going to be borderline impossible to collect my thoughts right now. I’ll try my best, though, in the coming days and weeks, as I find time between firefighting, work, and helping others.

Yes, this isn’t the worst “hack,” or the worst loss of funds, or the worst whatever. But I stand by my previous statement that it is a gaping wound in bitcoin’s very soul, and it will take a lot of time to heal that wound.

---

---

🧡

Found this valuable?

Give Value Back

Don't have sats to spare? Consider sharing it, translating it, or remixing it.
Confused? Learn more about the V4V concept.