When people with a drawer full of hardware wallets conclude that a spare phone is safer, the industry should take that as a verdict. And they’re not wrong about the problem. Every one of those devices does the same thing: it generates a seed, stores it on a chip, and asks you to trust the chip, the firmware updates, the box it shipped in, and a piece of paper in your drawer. A second phone does the same thing with a bigger attack surface. The problem was never the form factor. It’s the stored secret. Anything that holds your keys can be extracted, pre-loaded, intercepted in shipping, or seized. Bitfi took a different path in 2018: store nothing. Your keys are computed from a salt & phrase that only you know, used to sign, and erased. Nothing sits on the device to steal. No seed card to find. No reseller to trust. The firmware is open source and has been frozen for years. Bitcoin can’t reach its potential while self-custody means choosing which stored secret to worry about. Every incident like this week’s sends more people back to exchanges and ETFs, and that is the opposite of what Bitcoin was built for. There is no end to this cycle until the keys stop being stored.

6/ The same reasoning covers physical loss. A Bitfi stores no seed, encrypted or otherwise. Seized at a border, stolen, or opened on a bench, there is nothing on it to recover, and nothing to restore from, because there was never anything to back up.

1/ 594 BTC left ~500 wallets in 25 minutes this week. If you're affected or unsure, read Coinkite's advisory and Block's technical writeup before you do anything else. Don't move funds to a new wallet generated on the same firmware.