My thoughts around the recent catastrophe are still evolving. The dust hasn’t settled yet; neither have all transactions that are moving funds into attackers’ wallets (It’s safe to say that not all of them were even broadcast yet). And while I’ve broadcast GM and GN multiple times, I have yet to get a full night’s sleep.

It was a weird couple of days, to put it mildly. For thousands (tens of thousands?) of people, but also for me. Funeral. Emergency travel. Making sure that me and my family are okay. Trying to do what I can to help others.

I’m sitting in an airplane as I’m typing this, and I can’t help but think of the one line with the oxygen mask. Last weekend was like that. “We’ve lost cabin pressure. Put your own mask on first, and after that try to help others.”

I don’t even want to imagine all the scenarios. People on holidays. People in hospitals. The proverbial guy in the coma. Friends or acquaintances breaking into people’s homes, offices, garages, safe deposit boxes, and so forth. People flooring it on the highway to get to their keys. People who lost it all. How many of them are thinking about ending their life right now? When the damage is 100+ million and the affected are in the thousands, I’m afraid it’s more than zero.

And then there’s the 2nd and 3rd order effects. People losing it all because they make a mistake, mess up their new setup, or are getting scammed. And the ecosystem fallout, and so on and so forth. Brutal.

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I keep thinking about the spiritual damage that was and is being done. I’ve never been a fan of the word “spiritual,” but I can’t find a better word for what is happening. A lot of people are crushed right now. Spiritually crushed.

Friends, colleagues, people I look up to. Absolutely crushed by this. Feeling responsible. “How could I miss this?” “Why didn’t I look?” “How could I ever recommend a coldcard?” “Why did I trust this company to such an extent?” “Why didn’t I roll dice / why didn’t I tell others to roll the dice?”

Oh, the dice. I’m not sure how I feel about the dice thing to be honest, even though I’m somewhat of a dice roller myself. There is big victim blaming energy in the dice roll discussion. “Why didn’t you roll the dice, bro? You should’ve rolled the dice.”

Yeah, no. I don’t think so. The damn thing should’ve done what it is supposed to do, and the low-entropy path should never have been allowed to be there in the first place.

Speaking of which: James has responsibly disclosed that there might be an issue on the RNG side, as have others before him. How is it possible that these disclosures weren’t taken seriously? How can you receive multiple disclosures, as well as reports from customers, and dismiss them all? I can’t blame the conspiracy theorists for putting on an additional layer of tinfoil.

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And yet, Bitcoin is fine. It was one line of code. One vendor. One set of firmware versions. One type of hardware wallet. One CEO. One company. One developer.

That’s what bothers me the most right now: one developer. Like, what the fuck? How can the development process of a company be this negligent? No review? No proper commit messages? No making sure that the most important code path of the whole thing actually executes? And once more: why is there a low-entropy fallback in the first place? All the fancy features don’t matter if the main functionality is broken.

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My first reaction to this mess¹ was one of regret: I wrote about this exact issue, the issue of entropy, many times in the past. There’s a bunch of people who have read my stuff, and I know of multiple people who were unaffected by this exploit because of it. I stopped writing, however, and the new cohort of bitcoiners never had much exposure to my writing. I also regret not having a closer look at the codebase myself. Ah, regret. Painful, painful regret.

Anyway. I’m writing all this, at least in part, to see if I can trick myself into writing again. (I’ll try.)

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So, where do we go from here? And the answer I’m looking for isn’t “dice rolls” or “multi-vendor multisig.”

Where do we go from here, spiritually? What is the proper path forward? What is the lesson we can learn from all this? How are we going to integrate this catastrophe into our collective unconscious? Will there be a transmutation, or will most people just move on to the next thing and put their trust in some other company or device?

My heart goes out to anyone who has lost their savings, their sanity, or worse. To those who are now broke or broken, be it financially, spiritually, or otherwise.

Bad times. Bad seeds. Bad situation.

Cheerfulness in all situations, especially the bad ones.

My Calendar

Easier said than done.

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🧡

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