Season 4 quotes

“If fixing it actually required releasing a new device, because the old one wasn’t salvageable, then that’s not a good thing.”

“We have prioritized a lot of other privacy-centric features, like the ability to use the entire platform anonymously, without giving us any information, so you don’t expose anything that way.”

“A hardware wallet makes that a lot easier to actually interact with your crypto and do it in such a way that you don’t expose your private keys during the process.”

“Again, if someone’s really concerned about privacy, they don’t have to sign up or give us any information at all, in which case there’s really no way to associate it.”

“Some of that advice, especially about brain wallets… I don’t think anyone thinks brain wallets are good security in 2019. They’ve been shown to be very, very crackable.”

“That doesn’t always let you see entire Bitcoin addresses, which can be a little worrisome from a man-in-the-middle perspective.”

“Some vulnerabilities have been very minor over time. You want to get a fix out there, but the attack surface, or the likelihood of the attack, is very insignificant.”

“The Ledger support is not fully out yet, but it actually will be in a matter of weeks, not months.”

“At least our user base is not the one that’s generally asking for a Bitcoin-only device.”

“I think hardware wallets offer a very good degree of security, while still offering the convenience of being able to actually use them.”

“It works; the cryptographic assumptions are absolutely bulletproof. The problem in multisig is the whole user experience, and the security assumptions a hardware wallet makes.”

“Having a QR code modality doesn’t really change a lot of these attack vectors.”

“If you’re using a third-party service, it’s not only about privacy, it’s also about trust.”

“Otherwise your wallet doesn’t distinguish between where you got the money from.”

“It doesn’t mean that after one year from now, the device is just going to die and go away, it just means that there’s no guaranteed updates for it after a year from now.”

“If you use a hardware wallet, unless you connect your own full node, which we offer as an option in our app… the vast majority of people don’t.”

“We use a general-purpose microcontroller, where all of the code that runs on it is open source, and we use only the most well-vetted cryptographic libraries.”

“Multisig, the concept on the Bitcoin chain, is absolutely sane, but how a hardware wallet has to deal with multisig hasn’t really been worked out yet.”

“The issue is more that we felt that, in the long run, it wouldn’t be competitive on the market, mainly because it doesn’t have a screen.”

“That includes solving the security needs with hardware wallets, solving the privacy needs with the BitBox Base and full nodes, and solving usability issues with our BitBox app.”

“Because in general, I don’t actually take my hardware wallet out of my house and I don’t actually store my funds on the hardware wallet most of the time.”

“Some of these issues are very important, especially when wallets start being sold at scale, because the attack isn’t always on just a single wallet.”

“There are lots of complexities introduced by multisig, and for the problem it fixes, at least at this time, I don’t think they’re justified in most cases.”

“The wallet being popular is actually a very good indicator to somebody that’s not a security person, that the wallet has a better level of security.”

“When I check my backup, I don’t just check it on my Trezor. I also check it on another device, just to make sure it’s generating the same keychain on both devices.”

“Just like my Coldcard attack, this allows you to test an unlimited number of PINs, because you prevent the device from tracking each attempt.”

“What’s interesting is that, in just that little bit of logic I just gave you, you can actually parse out what the attack is.”

“For most people, the risks of losing your money, or of having it stolen by a private party, probably outweigh the risks of retaliation by a government.”

“My SD card looks just like a real SD card, but I’ve actually replaced the firmware on it. SD cards actually have little chips in them that run software. It’s not just pure hardware.”

“Since then I’ve been using Electrum and Wasabi, and when I’m using Wasabi on my PC, I don’t just store money there.”

“That’s also critically important, because if you combine it with the root of trust, it means you can give strong guarantees to an observer about exactly what is running on the chip.”

“You don’t really have a root of trust that you can use for your own code, because you can’t run code on the chip.”

“It’s interesting to see that pretty much everybody in this space thinks about OPSEC, because it’s important if you want to protect your privacy and conceal your assets.”

“Regarding privacy, I would say it’s more related to the software. The hardware wallet doesn’t do a lot regarding privacy; it’s more the software that you connect it to.”

“It’s a bit tricky because you don’t want to show this information yourself and you don’t want to provide third parties with a way to extract this information.”

“I can’t remember the name of the talk, but it was something like ‘Open source is not enough if you want to properly protect your hardware.’”

“Another thing that is quite weird about the ATECC608A is that it’s protecting keys but you don’t really know how because it has never been certified.”

“That’s the reason why I don’t think those chips have been used in other industries before, and their exact security has yet to be demonstrated.”

“You can’t hide the fact that you have a Bitcoin application on the device. On other devices, the firmware and the applications are mixed in some way, but you still have additional options.”

“It will give you a root of trust down to the manufacturer, which is extremely important, and it will give you the possibility to run code on your chip.”

“It was just because there was so much ICO money sloshing around that they could charge whatever they wanted, and the ICOs were going to pay.”

“They can go to governments and take a lot of money from them for services, and governments will pay up, because sometimes it just looks good to say you’re modernizing or automating a process.”

“They outbid any legitimate business, because they can always bid more than you. They’re just selling air.”

“When Cryptosteel made the original product, they open-sourced the design of it.”

“It takes a lot of time and effort to actually build it, because of economies of scale.”

“I do somewhat question the addition of Bluetooth, but I am not a security expert.”

“There’s only so much you can talk about a piece of metal.”

“People would generate the invoice so that it would end in a very unique satoshi amount, but it would always go to the same address.”

“It was on the opposite side of an E, and that’s because the letters you need the most of are A’s and E’s.”

“They’re just getting into Bitcoin, and it’s intimidating. Not only that, but they don’t have a background in a lot of this stuff.”

“It doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, because the cost-benefit isn’t that great: the FBI will spend a crazy amount of money tracking you down.”

“At the end of the day, we don’t really care if we’re popular, because we don’t think that’s the way to bring about change.”

“If you really trust Trezor, that’s cool, but if you really don’t want them to know exactly how much Bitcoin you have and where you live don’t do that.”

“If everything that the hardware wallet does is correct, but your computer actually switches out the QR code on you because it’s compromised, you just lost all your money.”

“That allows you to create multiple addresses and private keys so that you don’t have to have all of your money on one private key or one address.”

“It’s mostly just buttons and stuff, which they can skip over, and see that everything security-important is actually happening inside Bitcoin Core.”

“For me, I don’t know that any of those things impact how much money I would actually put on it.”

“I don’t think it was a scam back then.”

“He’s the head of business development at Kraken, and we’ve been going back and forth over the last few days, because I don’t recommend that people use steel.”

“It doesn’t apply as much to exchanges, because they just have a big database with all your balances and all your transactions.”

“The other aspect of that is, inflation is incredibly regressive in that it doesn’t affect the rich because the rich can go park their money in investments that aren’t affected by inflation at all.”

“They keep having to pivot to new variants of Ethereum precisely because they were never able to admit: well, yeah, Ethereum doesn’t scale, and we don’t know how to make it scale.”

“I think the toothbrush analogy isn’t necessarily so good, because sharing your hardware wallet isn’t necessarily so bad, but you really want to know where the hell you’re buying it from.”

“This is not to say that we would actually be extinct, but if in 40 years civilization doesn’t exist as we know it, I could certainly imagine that.”

“The biggest piece of advice I’d give you is: actually learn how this stuff works, and how to think about security and what it means.”

“My big one is that I think Bitcoin should have a small bit of inflation. My argument only becomes relevant in maybe another 20 years anyway, so it doesn’t really matter that much right now.” (at 1:31:03)”

“Right there, you’re going to have more focus on hardware wallets than is probably strictly necessary, just because it’s a way to make money.”

“They may be very pissed off, but depending on how you pull off the attack, it’ll be harder for them to actually notice anything’s wrong.”

“The more important thing is just don’t use the computer for very much. Don’t go using it to run games and stuff like that.”

“This is the irony of it: decentralization for privacy doesn’t necessarily work, because of Sybil attacks.”

“When I started in Bitcoin in 2010, I spoke to many people who were considering getting a little Bitcoin, and it was harder and harder to explain to them how to do a proper security setup, because most people were using cracked Windows. I found out that Bitcoin was not ready for the mainstream.”

“We were waiting to see if somebody else would come up with it, because it’s just too hard to do hardware properly.”

“The chip industry is bound together with intellectual property, contracts and patents, and we just refuse to bind ourselves to an industry we simply don’t agree with. We never promised the physical security of this particular chip, because even the manufacturer never promises that.”

“If you consider physical threats an issue for you, you should use a passphrase. Coldcard, on the other side, relies on the security of the chip, and this can create a false sense of security, which may turn out to be problematic.”

“We made it open source because we want to encourage the industry to standardize. We believe it’s another important step in the evolution of the industry.”

“Multisig is a great tool for multi-user funds, like a company with co-signers who are different parties. But many people use it in a way where they are the only cosigner with multiple devices, and that hurts usability and increases complexity. It’s so easy to shoot yourself in the foot.”

“Many people buy Bitcoin on an exchange and leave it there, but not your keys, not your bitcoins. I don’t count these people, because they just have another bank account which is denominated in Bitcoin.”

“A few years ago, Bitcoin was so small that people didn’t feel threatened by governments. Now states recognize it more and more, and it’s getting more probable that agencies will go after bitcoiners to tax everything. It makes much more sense to think about privacy now.”

“Security and privacy are two completely different things. You can be secure, you can hold your own private keys, but your xpubs may be completely public.”

“It’s our mission to secure as many people as possible, so usability is still a remaining issue, which we don’t think is solved yet.”

“The first thing people may ignore is that you really need something with a bigger screen. I think a lot of people have suffered from the tiny little buttons of Ledger or Trezor or other products.”

“Some say you can add software tactics so that you can forget about physical attacks. Personally, I really don’t agree with that.”

“Currently, everyone in the industry will tell you that you sign an NDA with the secure element vendor, so you cannot share anything about the secure element.”

“If you don’t trust our mobile app because you think it’s not open source, that’s okay. We’ll also make Electrum plugins, so that you can use the Cobo Vault with third-party wallets like Electrum.”

“What I cannot agree with in Trezor is a security structure that comes without a secure element. That’s the reason I won’t purchase a Trezor to store my personal assets: without it, it cannot survive physical attacks.”

“The second best one in my mind is Coldcard. I like Coldcard mostly because of NVK.”

“Separating the product into two versions, one multi-chain and one BTC-only, was very clever. The BTC-only version brings some simplicity to the product, and simplicity always brings security.”

“We know that someone is using a Cobo Vault and has 0.5 Bitcoin, but we cannot associate this 0.5 BTC with a specific serial number or a specific address.”

“I think every one of us should pay attention to privacy, because privacy is the future of your security. If you don’t pay attention to your privacy, one day your assets could be lost.”

“Bitcoin was born to give you full financial sovereignty. Other coins, like Ethereum, EOS or Tron, were not born for this purpose; they were born to build a world computer or another ecosystem. That’s why BTC holders care so much about security and privacy.”

“That’s super misleading, because, one, Trezor is not 100% auditable: unless you have an electron microscope, you cannot tell what the die of the chip is doing.”

“I think it’s important that we focus on physical security because a hardware wallet should be able to offer you more security than a Raspberry Pi.”

“The only difference is that they’re making releases that don’t have the shitcoins, but that’s still a substantial amount of resources put into those, or at least into reviewing and testing them.”

“If you are remote and the wallet is not connected to anything, you cannot retrieve the information you managed to attack.”

“The 608 was our trick to get secure-element security, because the 608 has secure-element security.”

“There are always going to be extremely advanced users, like Peter Todd, who know exactly where to drill the laptop and burn it afterwards, so that nobody can retrieve their stuff.”

“You can do watch-only with a Coldcard and Samourai, or with BlueWallet, Electrum, Core or really any wallet that supports watch-only. You can export the xpub and just watch it.”

“Now you can have a little more security with more parties involved, and that party is essentially you, so you’re not losing privacy.”

“There are other chips I’m experimenting with, and you’re probably going to see another version of it in a year or two, because it never ends.”

“The problem I have with it is that, one, it has not evolved to understand security needs, and two, it was completely unsafe physically.”