Bitcoin News

Story: Coldcard Bug Cost Bitcoin Holders Over 1,596 Coins and $100 Million

By Sakamoto Nashi

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How Rival Wallets Handle Entropy. The incident put every other hardware wallet maker on the spot. How do they generate entropy?

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Calls for Independent Audits and Bug Bounties. Nick Percoco, a security expert, pushed for new assurance standards in the wake of the incident.

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A critical flaw in the Coldcard hardware wallet led to the theft of more than 1,596 Bitcoin — worth over $100 million.

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Coldcard's maker, Coinkite, went public with the flaw on July 31. Attackers had already exploited it across multiple devices by then.

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Core Lightning developer Dustin Dettmer put forward one theory: the flaw may trace back to firmware changes made in 2021 that could have inadvertently disabled the hardware's…

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Three different approaches. All of them, in theory, better than having a single point of failure. But the Coldcard situation showed how quickly theory and practice can diverge.

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Security expert Jameson Lopp weighed in, noting that weak random number generators have hit various cryptocurrency wallets and libraries before.

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See also: 15 Attackers Steal Over $130M in Bitcoin from 7,300 Coldcard Wallets

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Zach Herbert from Foundation has been vocal about open-source development as a security culture, not just a feature.

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Coinkite's handling of the disclosure drew criticism on both counts. Some developers questioned the company's past responses to reported vulnerabilities.

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For people who own a Coldcard right now, Coinkite's guidance is to migrate funds away from at-risk wallets. That's the immediate fix.

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Broader than Coldcard, the incident is pushing a harder conversation about what self-custody actually requires from manufacturers. It's not enough to build a device that works.

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See also: Coldcard Firmware Bug Drains $116M as Bitcoin Holds Near $64,000

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The community is also watching how Coinkite communicates going forward. Transparency around security disclosures has always been uneven across the hardware wallet space.

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Coinkite's full technical postmortem is still pending.

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