Season 8 quotes

“Even if you don’t consent to it, and even if Shift Crypto never tells anyone that you bought a hardware wallet…”

“There is no way for the bank to know that you actually bought Bitcoin, as opposed to something else, because you transfer your money to that exchange.”

“This would be a nice feature for the BitBox02, because I don’t want to always type my long passphrase on the BitBox02.”

“I don’t own a Cobo yet, so I can’t really comment too much on what I think about it.”

“Even with the USB connection, you don’t need anything air-gapped, because by definition it works as it should, right? Air-gapping helps if you assume there are bugs or security issues lurking.”

“We have a Bitcoin-only edition for the Bitcoin-only people. The idea there is to reduce the attack surface. Less code is better.”

“For the Ledger device itself, I think it was a pretty genius move to add Bluetooth to the Nano X, because that allows you to connect to the iPhone.”

“I think it does help, but it really doesn’t help all that much with transaction signing, because transaction signing necessarily involves communication with the host computer.”

“That’s why he started a venture, nowadays called Tropic Square, and he wants to produce truly open-source security chips that you can fully audit.”

“It’s always hard to talk about total silver bullets, because as time goes by, people tend to discover more flaws and issues, or ways people abuse it.”

“This is something really important for us. It allows us to demonstrate that security is not only a word; there is something behind it.”

“Some people think that just because it’s in cold storage and they keep it there, it will never be vulnerable. But they will have to go online at some point, and when you go online, you have to use an interface that’s secure.”

“That means that, in the threat model of the security evaluation, the circuit must resist an attacker with physical access and a large amount of resources, time and equipment.”

“We think there is more value when a third-party laboratory tries to evaluate the security of the product. If everything goes well, you can obtain a security certification.”

“Even if you don’t think you need a hardware wallet, you’re going to need one when you recover the funds from the 12 or 24 words you stored somewhere.”

“From a privacy point of view, the good thing is that Ledger Live doesn’t send your xpub to our backend, contrary to some other wallets, by the way.”

“He wants to know how expensive it is to break the security of a physical device, a Nano S or Nano X, if an attacker doesn’t have the PIN but does have physical access to the device.”

“When possible, use a relay point or a PO box for the delivery of goods, but this is not always practical, for sure.”

“I don’t want to betray their thoughts, but I think when they designed the hardware, open source was the main, strong requirement.”

“A lot of engineers at Ledger come from the security ecosystem, and security is at the core of everything we do.”

“Maybe they don’t even have the proper mindset to understand why it’s important to separate money and state, why it’s important to be sovereign, why it’s important to own your own money.”

“As Bitcoin grows, as this stuff becomes more popular and more widespread, it actually starts challenging government sovereignty over money.” (at 15:51)”

“I don’t want people to be leaving coins at a custodian, totally oblivious to the fact that they’re missing out on the most important attribute of Bitcoin, which is self-sovereignty over that money.”

“Why will Bitcoin go up? The reason it will go up is that it brings an immutable quality to money that mankind has never had before.”

“User error is probably the leading cause of people losing their bitcoin, not custodians. So some people might just prefer that risk profile, but it is very important to convey to them what that risk profile is.”

“KeepKey, of course, is open source as well, because no one should be trusting their coins to any software that isn’t.”

“Bitcoin isn’t important because everyone will hold it on their own keys. It’s important because anyone can hold it on their own keys, if and when they choose to.”

“If you care about the whole principle of Bitcoin, which is immutability and having sovereignty over your own money, it’s okay to use custodial services sometimes, and to understand them.”

“In an open system, you can have a bunch of people who are very socialist within that paradigm, but the opposite can never be true. You can’t have a closed, controlled socialist system with free, open stuff happening within it.”

“You should learn enough to hold your own keys, and not just that, but understand why that’s important, and help others do so as well.”

“You don’t really have to have one, because not many people have actually gotten their hands on the devices.”

“You’re not going to have the same security as Bitcoin, or the same decentralization, but you’re going to provide privacy or scalability or something else. When you assess why you want to use it, there’s always some sort of trade-off.”

“Hardware can fail for multiple reasons: something in the air, humidity, temperatures that are too high or too low, and so on.”

“From a security point of view, I think Jade is better than Trezor because of the remote blind server.”

“When you receive, it doesn’t tend to do change validation, because it doesn’t know how to reconstruct the change address.”

“Don’t assume that because you have two wallets you don’t need a backup. They could both fail. Don’t assume the hardware will last.”

“There’s also BlueWallet, which is great for Lightning. For this particular use case, I think it’s very easy and intuitive: it does multisig without you even knowing you’re using multisig.”

“This is a nice workaround, so you don’t have to deal with them and possibly pay them a lot of money just to acknowledge that your device is valuable enough to be supported.”

“This is part of the threat model, but at the same time, I would be much more inclined to use a chip that’s open source as opposed to something I have to trust.”

“Once the hardware is compromised, how you got there doesn’t really matter. The point is the first time you start transferring data from the hardware back to the companion app.”

“The reason we’re able to do that is that not only do we have the camera, but we actually have a processor that is probably the fastest processor in any hardware wallet.”

“Security bounties are really important, and so is giving credit to the security researchers who find vulnerabilities, even if they’re with a competitor.”

“If that chip is compromised in some way, it does not degrade the security of the device, because you’re using the main MCU to actually run and execute all of the code.”

“The reason we don’t have a feature like that right now with Passport is, one, it’s new, and two, we do everything over QR codes. It’s harder to do that over QR; it’s easier over USB.”

“It’s possible to add it to your open-source device and augment the security, without relying on that security.”

“For one example, we actually had a phone call with Lazy Ninja, who had written about a supply chain vulnerability with Coldcard that I believe was never acknowledged and still isn’t fixed.”

“There are people working on truly open-source silicon, trying to make an open-source secure element or security chip.”

“That means we can’t work together to improve security and work on features like this.”

“I would say we’re probably around an eight or nine. Including a secure element on a device is definitely a trade-off.”

“What I’m trying to say is that it’s a spectrum, and it’s really important to unpack the nuance, as opposed to just saying: that’s not open source.”

“I’m sort of a sucker for user interfaces. I think good user interfaces encourage people to use best security practices, because as the interface deteriorates, you tend to use shorter PINs and shorter passphrases, because it’s more painful.”

“I really hate that view. It’s security-by-obscurity thinking: there’s just not much software for this platform, so it decreases my attack window. But you’re also decreasing the number of people who have the ability, and the desire, to review and study it.”

“I’m generally an anti-multisig guy. I’m really sort of an outlier there, and that’ll get some people to hate me.”

“You just don’t want a single point of failure.”

“In a few hundred years, somebody might come digging around your property, find your metal plates and recover your Bitcoin, just like a pirate treasure lost at sea. People think about Bitcoin as this electronic thing, but it really does have some physicality.”

“That’s why I don’t go on many interviews anymore, at least not during this bull market. I think it’s all crazy. You can make money out of anything. Right now the coin is more important than the fundamentals: if it sounds like Bitcoin, people are going to buy it.”

“I never realized how true it was going to feel when I first made that handle. It’s scarily true. I just cannot believe how quickly people caved, giving up their freedoms for safety.”

“They make these orders and they see everybody comply, even people who don’t want to comply, just because they don’t want the hassle. It emboldens them for the next time.”

“You can’t 100% trust your device. You never know if that random number generator can truly be tested.”

“I didn’t trade after that, because I felt so stupid after losing all that money trying to time the market.”

“Even though Trezor has been attacked by Kraken Labs and other labs, we still cannot deny that Trezor is the most open source.”

“In our design thinking, we think it’s really important to give people a big touchscreen, so everything is displayed very clearly. And because people are so used to their mobile phones, they will get used to touchscreens very easily.”

“This is called a fee attack. We proposed our solution to the fee attack, and in the end both Coldcard and we implemented very similar solutions to prevent it.”

“You should not make people anxious about using the product, because then people will make mistakes, which is really dangerous. So again, I think user experience is very important.”

“There’s this open-source approach to improving security, which means somebody else can take your code, use it, and find issues in it.”

“I always tell our users: don’t make it overcomplicated. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot.”

“We offer multi-coin firmware and also Bitcoin-only firmware. I think maybe one day we should launch a dedicated Bitcoin-only device, rather than asking our users to switch their multi-coin firmware to Bitcoin-only.”

“I don’t think Shamir backups and multisig are competing with each other. They enhance each other’s security. I don’t see any conflict between Shamir backup and the multisig feature.”

“My point is that a PIN is not strong enough, because it’s really easy to get through with a fault attack.”

“There is no actual security audit if you don’t publish the code and claim that it’s under NDAs and stuff like that.”

“There was security research which showed that it actually doesn’t fix the problem with the validation of previous transactions.”

“It’s clearly irresponsible to tell people that they should trust the hardware itself and not use a passphrase, because really, nobody knows what’s inside the hardware.”

“When the emotions settled down, we realized that this is not what we are going to do, and not something we believe in doing in the future.”

“I don’t have a good answer for this, because I don’t think the air gap, exchanging data with QR codes, solves any significant problem.”

“I think it’s about teaching users that it’s really important to have this recovery seed, not to tell it to anybody, and not to type it into a computer.”

“It’s important to say that we always wanted to deliver something like this, but it was impossible with the previous tech, which was more website-based, like the old wallet.trezor.io.”

“I think the security of open source is the way to achieve security.” (at 6:46)”

“If I remember well, it was because of KeepKey, because it was the first commercial clone. But something similar happened even with Coldcard.”

“The problem is that you have no way to check whether your backup is alive until you put it into some computer to actually read the data.”

“The game is only about making it expensive enough or hard enough, so there will be fewer people who can practically make the attack. But there’s no silver bullet for this.”

“We keep it purposely unstable, mess about on it, test all the cutting-edge stuff on it and break it regularly. People shouldn’t put funds on there, but they always put too much money on there.”

“Honestly: don’t be worried, don’t be scared of it.”

“Obviously it would have to be not too complicated, so you’d be able to recreate it, because if not, you’re in danger of losing your funds if you can’t recreate your PIN.”

“Everything should be debated and discussed. There should be a dialectic, because that’s how people progress and eventually get more liberties: through the exchange of ideas, not by trying to smother concepts.”

“I think Bitcoin over the Lightning Network is going to revolutionize computer games. It has a whole extra layer.”

“Even if they cannot open-source the parts that deal with the secure element, the wallet parts, the interface parts and everything else are open source.”

“There are times when mutual aid, pooling resources, creates more liberty for people, but at the trade-off of one individual’s liberty. Like pooling resources for a health service or an educational system.”

“We don’t have a CEO of Bitcoin, we don’t have a CEO of LNbits, we don’t have a CEO of BTCPay Server.”

“Shitcoins don’t run nodes. They don’t care about self-validation, they don’t care about open source. Honestly, they don’t care much about decentralization; they’re just money-grab projects.”

“It was very serendipitous, that conference, because at that table a guy called Ken Sedgwick came over, and he was really into the little point-of-sale device.”

“Human beings will always try to organize themselves as a means of guaranteeing some degree of physical security, and those organizations are going to be hierarchical to some degree.”

“I have a certain track record of releasing assembled SeedSigner releases that don’t seem to be nefarious in any way, but it is a trust model.”

“I think it’s the idea of Bitcoin that puts that pressure on people.”

“Because we’re just not storing the data that the private key represents, it’s a different security model, with some convenience trade-offs.”

“Human beings are not perfect, and we’re not perfectible. So there are always going to be people who try to harm other people.”

“In the Bitcoin space, people tend to be a lot more honest than in the shitcoin space.”

“It’s kind of a new security model that’s emerging. I think there’s been a progression over the entire life of Bitcoin, with the security models people use evolving to improve.”

“With security, there are always trade-offs. You can’t have convenience without trade-offs in different areas.”

“The primary way it communicates with Specter, actually the only way, if I correct myself, is through QR codes.”

“You consider private key storage, versus a device that signs, or proves that it has knowledge of the private key.”

“This is really huge, and I don’t know why they don’t market it this way, because they talk about Bluetooth security and blah blah.”

“It doesn’t really make sense to use a hardware wallet then, because you would spend 10% of your money on it. In that case, a normal app would be fine.”

“My personal take is that DIY hardware wallets are better than laptops, because their attack surface is smaller. When you look at your laptop, there are plenty of components in there.”

“If you are building a hardware wallet, keep in mind that it actually comes down to the security of your laptop at the point when you upload the firmware.”

“The underlying layer, the bootloader and stuff, is written by another guy in our company who is actually a security expert.”

“It would be perfect if they could work on something together, but that will probably never happen.”

“He was a fan of buying used iPhones and wiping them, because he said the security on them is very good.”

“This is also why I started building a hardware wallet: I don’t trust anyone else, including Trezor, Ledger and so on.”

“You start by researching what has been done, you come up with ideas for improving the whole setup, and then you start building it. You spend five years building it.”

“Maybe we’ll start doing quantum mining, because for mining you don’t actually need to reverse the whole hash function. You only need to find a solution that starts with a certain number of zeros.”

“You should consider that one day Keystone may no longer exist. It’s almost impossible, but there is some possibility that one day Keystone doesn’t exist.”

“At the same time it has a larger attack surface, because it has Bluetooth, it has Wi-Fi, it has all of these features that can be exploited from a security point of view.”

“It’s definitely impossible to make 100% open-source hardware, because you have to purchase ICs from other companies, and there’s very low-level code on those ICs.”

“Even for them, it’s impossible to make every component themselves; open-sourcing all the embedded code is impossible.”

“It’s okay because, first, the Cobo Vault itself, the code especially, is open source.”

“We will not only offer Bitcoin-only firmware, but also a Bitcoin-only device.”

“Bitcoin is developing very fast, and you have to keep up with those trends, not only in the hardware wallet’s software, but also in the software wallet itself.”

“From my perspective, every hardware wallet and every hardware wallet founder is trying to find a balance between security and user experience.”

“I think it’s also part of the reason why there are so many Trezor clones around the world: it was the first one to be truly open source.”

“This is one of the most important design philosophies of the Cobo Vault, and right now it’s also one of the most important design philosophies for Keystone.”