Itās been two weeks, to the day. Two weeks since the beginning of the coldcard catastrophe, aka entropy emergency, aka the big suck. Two weeks since I buried my mother.
Two weeks. I barely slept in these two weeks. The adrenaline is slowly but surely leaving my body. Iām tired. Everything hurts. My nervous system is trying to recalibrate from emergency mode back to normal.
Normal. What does ānormalā even mean these days? Nothing looks normal, nothing feels normal. At least on the internet it doesnāt. Everything is AI, everything is generated, most articles I canāt read because my slop allergy doesnāt allow me to. I tried reading this and this and this and this, but I couldnāt.1 I had to stop after a paragraph or two. Itās all slop. Zero thought. Minimum amount of care, if any. What a sad state of affairs. (I was able to read this and this, though. They are still LLM generated, but at least they are well researched and were done with care.)
Anyway.
As is evident from my past posts, Iāve been trying to work through the coldcard situation by writing about it (because writing is thinking, remember?). Iām still processing. I still have many questions. I mostly have one question, to be honest: āHow was it possible for something like this to happen in the first place?ā
As always, time will provide some of the answers, I guess.
Or at least I hope it will.
Thereās another thing about this catastrophe that isnāt much talked about yet: the negative privacy implications.
A lot of people were forced to emergency-move a lot of UTXOs to a temporary setup, unwillingly consolidating said UTXOs in the process. My guess is that lots of KYC and non-KYC stashes got combined. Lots of coinjoin outputs got recombined too, if I had to wager another guess.
And to add insult to injury once more, we have to assume that all affected private keys will be public, given enough time. The brute-forced seed phrases will be sold to the highest bidder in one way or another, whether it be on dark markets or directly to chainalysis companies (if they havenāt brute-forced the whole set themselves by that point in time).
Everything will be linked, all accounts and sub-accounts will be identified. If only one of these addresses ever touched any exchange or anything with KYC information attached to it, all your privacy is gone. Brutal. Absolutely brutal.
I have to repeat what Iāve said previously once more: this is all so brutal because it is hitting the people that actually cared about cold storage, that cared about privacy, that cared about doing things right and being self-sovereign and so on. I canāt help but shake my head in disbelief and repeat the same word over and over again: brutal.
Two weeks. Two weeks of mayhem, and it isnāt even over yet.
š§”
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