Jack explains why hardware wallets are riskier than you think:

yeah do a dedicated episode on SeedSigner vs other storage, they solved supply chain attack I'm not a security expert, but its much smaller attack surface than an offline laptop + OS, plus way cheaper

I just really wish Bitcoin Core had an easy GUI way to do multisig and I'd be happy.

Jack, Bitcoin Core shipped a wallet deletion bug last year. Versions 30.0 and 30.1 had a migration failure that could delete your entire wallet directory. The binaries were pulled from bitcoincore(dot)org. After that, Core 31.0 shipped a private broadcast feature that leaked your IP address to any malicious peer who forced a v1 retry. The stated privacy guarantee was that recipients would never know your IP. It was broken on release. This is not a new pattern. CVE-2018-17144 was an inflation bug that sat in production for 18 months. A miner could have created Bitcoin out of thin air, in violation of the 21 million cap. It was never exploited, but not because the process caught it. A high-severity consensus bug, CVE-2024-52911, was fixed in Core 29.0 and publicly disclosed in May of this year. The governance structure that produces these bugs is not incidental. Our quantitative analysis of 25,122 Core PRs shows that 25.5% of maintainer-merged PRs are self-merges. Three people control 81.1% of all merges in the repository's history. Since 2022, one maintainer accounts for roughly half. The "arsonist and fireman" pattern is documented: same contributor introduces a bug and authors the fix, independent verification bypassed. When roughly 99% of Bitcoin nodes run one implementation lineage, that is the attack surface. Every bug in that codebase is a systemic Bitcoin risk, not a software bug with a narrow blast radius. You said Strategy and Strike have incentives to keep Core safe. Here is the actual structure. Five people hold commit access to Bitcoin Core. They are employees and grantees of a small set of institutions whose founders and funders circulate among each other and have direct financial interests in specific protocol directions. Bitcoin was designed to eliminate trusted third parties. Its reference implementation is controlled by them. The people with the most to lose have every incentive to keep that quiet, because the narrative that Bitcoin infrastructure is sound is load-bearing for their business models. Hardware wallet failures are real. But you told people to just buy a laptop and run Bitcoin Core on it. Windows and macOS both ship zero-days on a regular cadence, Microsoft has a decades-long pattern of bundling attack surface directly into the OS, and your browser runs in the same process space as your wallet. Whatever hardware security a laptop has is built for OS integrity and disk encryption, not for Bitcoin key isolation. A hardware wallet exists precisely to take your keys off that machine entirely, into a purpose-built environment with no network exposure and no shared process space. Telling people to abandon that for a laptop running Core is not a security upgrade. It is a step backward dressed up as one. I am completely allocated to Bitcoin. I have spent 12 months and significant capital building the quantitative and governance case for implementation diversity as Bitcoin's ideal security posture. No one has engaged with the risks and incentives of this space more rigorously than this work has. I am not bragging. I am begging. The data is there. The argument is there. If you actually care about Bitcoin, prove it. Engage with it.

It is workable but my thesis is that the reason Satoshi's coins have never moved is because it was all on his laptop, and it had a major drive failure. I personally prefer the multi-vendor multisig 2 of 3 using Sparrow and an airgapped laptop for signing transactions, and a high entropy unique passphrase on each key, and working to memorise all 100+ words with daily recall inside my disturbed mind, but then, I am probably some form of autistic. 😆 Either way, for me... I have to have at least 2 vendor devices to complete an airgapped transaction signing. Never one. To each to their own! Be safe out there people! Most Bitcoin is likely lost from over-engineering security and locking yourself out, than it is in actual remote theft!

Fud

So.. you can't store it anywhere? 💀

Two safe deposit boxes at two separate banks: one for the seed phrase (words deliberately scrambled) and one for the Coldcard. The same setup is repeated in three different countries. Even if someone (including a bank employee) accessed the seed box, the scrambled order would still need to be solved. Anyone who obtained the Coldcard would have only a limited number of PIN attempts (it warns after 3 and permanently bricks itself after 13, or sooner if configured that way) before the device becomes permanently useless.

Yeah, now suddenly everyone start explaining how risky they are but I never heard them talking about it before as a matter of fact EVERYONE promoted these garbage "hardware wallets".

Where does jack hold his btc?

This is a major issue for BTC. If normal people have to struggle and jump through hoops to securely store it, then they will just buy the etf because it’s easy and safer.

Put some clothes in your f*cking CLOSET JACK!

Bitcoin core is a captured counter party, worse advice ever,

Crypto is Trash 🗑️ SELL CRYPTO BUY POKÉMON

confused!

The device isn’t the only risk, the channel it came through is too. Keys bought from the same reseller share the same supply chain, so diversify where your multisig keys come from

Truth has been spoken.

What AI editing is this? It’s fire.

Maybe a workshop on how to do that from scratch would be a good idea.

He should worry about securing his closet someone stole all his clothes 😱

Пустая хата.Его тоже обокрали?

exactly, I felt off when they were giving away free Bitcoin with a Hardware purchase. Made no sense.

👀

Bitcoin core is mainly used as a node, wallet features are not that great. But, you have a point on general hardware. My take is, just use an iphone and a trusted app to hold your keys

When you say “store it there” @jackmallers, are you meaning leave the keys on the generic computer? Store it there vs create it there, two different things. What’s your thoughts on CDs? On yeti or other guides using Core?

Is that a walk in closet? Kinda dope

So, which options do we have left to secure our digital assets? The standard was a hardware wallet.

so how are the custodians creating seeds? why not share how you do it?