The drama regarding the ColdCard issue reminds me of the aviation industry, which, whenever it faces a major crash, does a tremendous amount of investigation that eventually leads to a great lesson to get to a safer future. Hope we all get that lesson and work on making it better.

Open-source code is NOT inherently secure. 594 BTC ($38 Million) stolen from 500 wallets just proved it. Here is the truth about open-source code used in different places in Bitcoin-related products, like the one used for ColdCard Hardware wallets: It is a double-edged sword. ⚔️ On one side, public code allows total transparency and community auditing. On the other side, "open source" does not mean bug-free. A silent flaw can sit hidden in plain sight for 5 years across multiple hardware generations. The recent Coldcard security exploit revealed the catastrophic scale of single-vendor risk: An automated operation swept ~500 single-signature wallets, draining 594 BTC in less than an hour. The root cause? A firmware configuration bug bypassed the hardware RNG, dropping seed entropy down to ~72 bits. Every seed generated since March 2021 without 50+ manual dice rolls was created with a weakened foundation. And here is the hardest lesson of all: Updating the firmware prevents future bugs... ...but it cannot repair a seed that was already created. Affected Bitcoiners must manually migrate their funds to a newly generated seed. This carries three non-negotiable truths for self-custody: Transparency is not a substitute for bug-free code. Firmware patches can't undo a compromised seed foundation. 1 device = 1 single point of failure. You should never rely on a single hardware wallet or single vendor—no matter how respected, cypherpunk, or open-source it is. At Keystody, we champion a multi-key (multisig) architecture. When you distribute custody across multiple independent keys and devices, a firmware flaw or seed bug in any single system never puts your entire Bitcoin vault at risk. What’s the single biggest security lesson a hardware failure or bug taught you?

Read more about the coldcard issue here keystody.com/blog/coldcard-s…