Seed phrases were a breakthrough for Bitcoiners. But they also handed users the hardest part of the problem: securing them. Bitkey takes a different approach. bitkey.build/seedless-is-saf…

So ready to do my part in pacing the frontier 🫡 :D

Never been more aligned

This is a better way to visualize Columbus’ voyages than the traditional way (that shows him traveling through a modern map).. It looks a lot crazier and more daring when you see it as a trip into the unknown.

Lots of people have been asking for a demo of Bitkey's Emergency Exit Kit. So here it is! This is the way you can move your funds if access to the official Bitkey app ever becomes unavailable to you for any reason.

North American climate zones compared with their Eurasian equivalents

Dollar plunges 11% in a day after Treasury unveils new efforts to ease the US’s deepening struggles to pay its debts.

Jack Dorsey's simple rule for success in business

Bitkey got so much unfair hate from people who had a very poor understanding of it's tradeoffs. They broke every self custody rule: - seedless - cloud backups - fingerprint unlock - no screen (for rev 1) In isolation many of those decisions seem bad. When you step back and reason about the properties of the system as a whole, it achieves a level of UX not seen before, while still retaining very strong security properties. You often have to break the rules to innovate and come up with something better. These absolute chads willed an entirely new category of self custody solutions into existence. It does have tradeoffs, and it's maybe not the perfect solution for everyone. But it's damn fine engineering. Like 50% of the tricks in Anzen's design are yanked straight from Bitkey. (v glad rev 2 got the screen though!)

Today, we're taking another big step forward with transparency at @Bitkey. Introducing Bitkey Security Updates. Going forward we'll keep a persistent, public log of every relevant security-related bug we fix in the Bitkey system. For each update, we'll describe the bug, its impact, its fix and any required customer actions. We'll also include information about who found the bug, whether it be our own security teams at Bitkey/Block or by external researchers. We believe this type of visibility is in line with the Bitcoin ethos. It's what customers deserve, particularly with the advancements in the ability of LLMs to find critical security vulnerabilities. We hope this gives our customers clarity and peace of mind. We'll work hard to keep you in the loop as we continue to build. bitkey.world/security-update…

You discover Bitcoin on a Tuesday. At first, it sounds incredible – hard money, fixed supply, no government can print more of it. You spend a couple of hours reading about it, buy a little, and start wondering how you somehow missed the most interesting financial idea of your lifetime. Then a friend tells you the real education happens on X. “Follow the Bitcoin people. You’ll learn fast.” So you make an account, follow a few important names with laser eyes and Roman statues in their profile pictures, and for roughly four minutes everything is fine. Then someone announces that Coldcard has been hacked. You don’t know what Coldcard is, but apparently this is very bad. Before you can figure that out, someone else explains that the only secure way to create a wallet is to roll physical dice in an air-gapped room, while another person argues the dice themselves could be compromised. Then BTCPay is being drained, BIP110 is failing, everyone is calling everyone else a government agent, and you have absolutely no idea what any of these words mean. Yesterday, you thought Bitcoin was digital gold. Today, you’re wondering whether you need to learn cryptography, build a computer from scratch, buy a Faraday cage and move to El Salvador. So you make the mistake of asking one innocent question: “Is it okay if I just leave my Bitcoin on Coinbase?” Your phone immediately melts. NOT YOUR KEYS, NOT YOUR COINS. NGMI. FED. READ THE WHITEPAPER. Someone explains that your Bitcoin isn’t real unless you run your own node, another says the node is compromised unless you built the machine yourself, and a third guy appears to suggest that true self-sovereignty requires generating your seed phrase in a cave. You stare at the screen for a moment. You came here to learn about money and somehow wandered into a civil war between cryptographers arguing about firmware. You close X, open your brokerage account, type NVDA and click buy. “AI seems pretty straightforward.”

Super easy to set up a @Bitkey: piped.video/MOJNu-e1Zp0?is=j11O…

Yesterday I began fully integrating the @OpenAI trust cyber program into my Bitcoin Red Team efforts. This morning I woke up to see this. I am now being blocked from doing additional analysis on a codebase which I've already responsibly disclosed to, and have received confirmation had legitimate findings. To be clear, this is after having already KYC'd and completed the onboarding process months ago to use the cyber capabilities OpenAI has to offer. I am now prevented from being able to continue the investigation in a further effort to make sure their code changes are sufficient, as well as understand if there are other issues that have yet to be discovered. It absolutely guts me as a patriotic American to have to do this, but I will be going back to using Chinese open source models to conduct my research to protect Bitcoin infrastructure. Black hats will not hit these issues. The white hats will. We've hit a local minima in policy. Intelligence is unrestricted for those who don't follow rules, and those who engadge in harm reduction are left on the sidelines. What are we doing in this country? How is this keeping people safe? Please do something @DavidSacks @sama @realDonaldTrump

hi

DCA within @CashApp (spread and fee free) and automatically trigger onchain withdrawals to your @Bitkey at the threshold you set. Super seamless integration, set it and forget it. Cutting it in tomorrow’s release.

A honeypot set up on a vulnerable Coldcard MK3 was hit by an attacker just 10 seconds after depositing sats. A pre-signed RBF transaction raced the attacker in real time and won, but the attacker came back with a higher fee. The race continues until every sat is burned in mining fees rather than ending up in the hacker's wallet.

Red Team Update In the final hours before @callebtc resumes his role as chief clank officer and wartime general of red team, I wanted to give some kind of update about today. We are accelerating. Not only in the expanse of repositories covered (over 300) and our spend (almost $40k), but in the efficiency to quickly identify where parts of the codebases will break. Seeing dozens vulnerability reports in an hour will do that to you. Another fascinating thing is how different members of the team are able to get entirely different outcomes based on our own applied knowledge. An example was when I scanned a repo and found some middling concerns. I showed the results to another member of the team, and with 1-2 sentences and maybe a block of code, they were able to upgrade to high or even critical vulnerabilities. That happened twice. Its almost like the agent can smell out something is wrong, but hasn't been trained enough yet to clearly verbalize it, so the slightest nudge of good knowledge/context will send it all on another recursive flurry deeper. I think there is some deeper lesson there about AI's productivity gains further accelerates the division of labor, but I'm too tired to get so abstract. The Red Team harness I mentioned yesterday was quickly thrown together over 20-30 minutes laying out conceptually, who I someone who has no security research, would think this would work. I now have multiple responses to disclosures telling me it was very well written, but I'm wondering if the bar is so low because they think it'll be llm slop. Maybe because its written in a way an LLM can pick right up and give exact feedback. Upon receiving a disclosure, one developer critically read through the whole report and gave a lot of very strong constructive feedback (you know who you are, thank you). I asked if they could give it as a lesson to my clanker, to which they returned to me a 50 kb markdown file. After which, I interviewed it for 30 minutes, integrating behaviors I wanted to focus on into the harness behaviors into the model, and quickly found even stronger success as a result. Seeing how impactful that feedback session was, I'm making a point tomorrow to NOT be scanning repos (as much). My focus primarily will be working on the harness and systems itself. I have a lot of ideas, maybe I'll come back tomorrow with lessons learned. Outside the harness, I want to focus more on operations. Every step of the process is chaotic right now. I accidentally nuked the repo this morning by not paying attention to Calle's new style guide and frantically had to unwind it. Another delay was at one point I walked away from my computer at the wrong time and the balance on @opencode spiked down to -$1000. It killed dozens of ongoing agents/subagents, and got frantic pings about scans going down. 20 minutes later, I noticed that none of my credit cards worked anymore. I then got the error "try debit card", and that failed too! I watched the balance tick to under $100, knowing I was close to stalling everyones jobs again when suddenly it worked (thx @jayair for quick support it worked out). I also want to focus on triaging all of our disclosures. We should be able to turn these around a lot faster now, and cleanly sort what has and has not been shared yet. In other news... To be blunt, I'm still numb over the death of the cold card. I have not heard of many stories about the lives ruined, and that is probably on purpose because I've made @AnchorWatch and the Red Teaming my sole focus. I have blocked out the thought of even starting to process the catastrophic harm that has been caused to my friends and their families. There is a tragic irony that is not lost on me that good people wanting to store their wealth, their time, their future dreams in a more honest and fair system were exploited by the thing they took refuge in. I truly believe these events have been a spiritual attack on bitcoin, and I mean that in the literal senses of the words. While things are not easy right now. I have the highest conviction ever in my life that the idea and technology of Bitcoin is worth fighting for. To that end. There is no Bitcoin without self custody. This is non negotiable. That does not mean everyone must self custody, but the option to is necessary for a free and prosperous society which respects property rights. I think one of the biggest lessons from all of this is one of risk management. There was a latent Risk of Ruin in how many people held their bitcoin, and unfortunately what many thought to be impossible, came to pass. I will find time to grieve, but today isn't the day.

We are now mapping the ongoing Coldcard attack with a live dashboard - link below I am deploying tripwire UTXOs that have varying levels of added entropy on top of the broken default seeds. We have different levels for 5, 10, 15, ... dice rolls, and 1, 2, 3, ... passphrase words. This is so we can approximate the frontier of the confiscations that are actively happening. The control UTXO with no added entropy was swept in an hour. I took real measurements on an MK3 to calibrate a "good bad entropy" emulator in software. The control confiscation has proven it to work. I am going to continue to deploy tripwire UTXOs along the bit curve. Huge thanks to @Rob1Ham @otaliptus @PortlandHODL and other redteamers for the help.

If you are pointing frontier models at FOSS code bases - cool. Let's ensure the ecosystem is safe, the more eyes the better. But don't recklessly tweet out to try to spread panic or chase clout. People are on edge from Coldcard. Responsibly disclose with the team that can actually verify your claims, respond the right way, and then most importantly, safely fix the issue (if it's real). We've been getting lots of engagement from people across the ecosystem. That's great. But, like with anything AI, even the cyber models can produce slop. I am not dismissing Floppy's claim here. I acknowledged it and we are looking into it within 30 mins of his posting. Any bug or vulnerability is urgent to us, and we are on it. But this should be done over email, and not in public where unverified claims can lead to false narratives and unnecessary panic.