Now basically: every single attack that's been described as "theoretical" or "far-fetched" or "only existing in the mind of a paranoid person" did actually happen.

We're talking here about a tiny eSIM implant and a little CPU doing OCR on the fonts appearing on the hardware wallet's screen to read the secrets during set up. So the secure element ain't tampered with.

Not long ago the Coldcard hardware wallet had an issue where it'd fallback to a 32-bit only RNG that could be cracked and so many people got their coins stolen.

Now it's Ledger that sees tampered devices all around the world (in Asia for sure but now there are reports about reseller in the EU selling backdoored/eSIM'ed devices).

For people who own Bitcoin at this point one of the only thing kinda sensible to do is to use multisig schemes, like 2-of-2 or 3-of-3 multisig, where your split the secret over two or three different hardware wallet brands (meaning being able to sign a 2-of-2 wallets requires hardware wallets from two different vendors).

When Ledger hardware wallets came out and people said that seed (the list of words) could be intercepted and relayed by a channel bypassing the computer (here by using an eSIM), people would post explaining that people were nuts if they thought such an attack could be pulled off.

Yet here we are.

And Ledger is responsible for very poor security practices: for example it's impossible to use a Ledger hardware wallet in a fully airgapped/offline way. For you're forced to not only upgrade the firmware but also install the Bitcoin "ledger app" (or whatever that is called) after you entered your seed into the device.

Which is complete and total amateur hour.

In addition to that Ledger offers a service to "backup your seed": what could possibly go wrong with that uh?

I'm betting that we'll soon hear about hardware wallets getting drained due to the seed being exfiltrated through "randomness" in how transactions are built/signed (aka "kleptography").

And it's not just representative about people in the cryptocurrencies ecosystem: people simply don't understand computer security and don't understand the potential attacks nor the length at which attackers are willing to go to steal data/funds/ruin other people's lives.

At this point we've heard about chips' plans being modified before the chips are even built (only to lower the entropy of RNGs) [unrelated to cryptocurrencies btw], a worldwide backdoor attempt in SSH, eSIM sending secrets from hardware wallets with tiny attack surfaces.

You're not anywhere near paranoid enough.

> Now basically: every single attack that's been described as "theoretical" or "far-fetched" or "only existing in the mind of a paranoid person" did actually happen.

Huh? Nothing here is theoretical or far-fetched. Hardware attacks of this sort have been documented for decades and basically part-and-parcel for most intelligence agencies, from the US govt installing backdoors in Cisco hardware to the exploding pagers for Hamas. This is not even the first hardware wallet attack documented on the internet (although it might be the largest-scale one).

It's just that hardware attacks are complicated, expensive, and risky, so they're usually done in a targeted manner. The only news here is that the crypto community painted a gigantic target on their backs by inventing a currency that can be taken from them with zero recourse, broadcasting it to the world that they own a lot of it, and then buying cheap hardware from overseas retailers to "protect" their assets. So all of sudden, it was profitable and relatively low-risk to cast a wider net.

It's fascinating in the sense that we're discovering from first principles why the financial system works the way it does. The damage caused by cryptocurrencies has been really pretty staggering, for little real benefit.

This reminds me of the 2020 case where a union organizer thought there was a spy camera inside a utility pole outside his house. It was in a conspiracy subreddit, so it seemed like the deranged ramblings of a ravingly-paranoid stranger. But they found the addresses of the IP cams and had plenty of evidence to corroborate it.

Now, Flock cameras are just normal.

I think the 2020s will be defined by this trend. "Things which only existed in the minds of a paranoid person" becoming normal parts of daily life.

Here are two sources on the matter:

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy_commons/comments/gin79z/...

https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/activists-find-camera-insi...

In August 2020, this was unbelievable, and it would have been considered reasonable (if wrong) to dismiss OP as paranoid, especially for the subreddit they posted in.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x46gnh/a_fake_cry...

That poster didn’t even prove the fake wallet app stole his bitcoin (in the sense required in a court of law). Presumably it wasn’t worth the effort because their money was gone and not coming back, but still.

https://www.amazon.com/ColdTi-Cryptocurrency-Extremely-Alpha...

In some ways this is kinda encouraging, because it means that even in cases where society collapses and the government disappears, there are really only two fundamental technologies needed to reboot everything: money and contracts.

The incentives lead us toward the classic "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders." scenario.

https://www.insidehook.com/culture/story-tom-toro-new-yorker...

Cryptocurrencies have the advantage that they can be spent worldwide, instantaneously, with little friction, while most commodities require that you be physically present to exchange them. They're also significantly easier to store and more resistant to garden-variety theft, as long as they're secured by passphrases. But they exist in the uncanny valley of requiring electricity and Internet. It is fairly unlikely that the government collapses and yet you still retain always-on electricity and Internet. What will you use to pay the electric company, and how do you enforce the contract that they keep providing you power?

There's perhaps an interesting role for a digital cryptocurrency that does not require always-on connectivity, eg. something that can be carried over SneakerNet for local transactions, and then automatically syncs up with the global system when the community regains Internet connectivity. In actual conflict zones today, people seem to get intermittent electrical & Internet connectivity, eg. the electricity will come on for an hour a day with rolling blackouts, and then you try to get everything charged in that one hour. And there are enough solar installations out there that several communities are likely to retain significant power even in the event of a societal collapse. But current crypto's consensus mechanisms aren't built for intermittent connectivity: you'd need to build and design something that is eventually consistent, where a weeks-long fork does not result in two competing cryptocurrencies.

https://fee.org/articles/how-a-fish-became-prison-currency/

Are cigarettes really currency in this case? Aren't they more like one of many possible barter units? Can't you also price things in ramen packs in prison?

Similarly, I thought the sea shells thing had been sort of debunked. In that scale of society you don't need currency, you know the guy. David Graeber summarizes this rather intuitively. Why would you need to give a guy a sea shell in a "hunter gatherer group"? You're gonna see him every day of your life and everyone is gonna know/remember he owes you one. It would be like giving your sibling a sea shell because you did them a little favor or something. It doesn't actually happen that way because it would be a complete waste of time, just actually return the favor next time. I believe the sea shell thing is more like a gift, rather than a currency. Like you might give someone a flower to tell them you think they're swell. Presumably you think that because they helped you at some point. That doesn't make it currency. People just liked giving each other shells.

I think on most modern theories, currency really comes about from conquest. The idea is as you expand these informal IOUs are not enough. You don't want to have to lug around ramen packs or cigarettes. So at the point of a sword or w/e you say hey take this coin and give us food and then you honor the coin enough and people trust it, not because it's "fungible, tradable, generally-durable commodity that the bulk of society decides to accept as being worthwhile" but because if you don't accept it the government will kill you. And if you do accept it then not only will they not kill you but they'll give things back to you later, which you will end up being a positive incentive for everyone. Now instead of a presiding over a killing field you've created a market. But without the threat of the state, it is not coherent. That's what government is.

That's basically what it says on American money. "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private". So sure a business can refuse you service, that's a separate issue. But if you have a debt in the United States and you try to give them US dollars and they refuse and say, no thanks actually we demand cigarettes - well now they are breaking the law, aka inviting the wrath of the state. So everyone uses dollars because the last thing anyone wants is to be in debt and think a pack of ramen is gonna work and they just get to say no thanks cigarettes for me please.

And of course, you also don't want to get impaled on a spike by a dude who looks suspiciously like that guy on the coin you probably should have taken.

You actually see this on a small scale today in the functioning of many small communities, eg. you don't actually exchange currency to pay the host of a party, but you are expected to reciprocate and host sometimes yourself if you want to keep getting invited. There's a surprisingly large amount of these unpaid micro-transactions that happen, eg. my wife has gotten free childcare, free advice, free (used) furniture, free baby clothes, etc, all in the heart of Silicon Valley, because she reciprocates and also gives away her old furniture, baby toys, baby clothes, advice, introductions, childcare, etc. But when we have to pay the contractor for work on our house, we need dollars. When we buy a computer, we need dollars. When we buy all those goods that we give away new, we need dollars. That again reinforces the "credit is for people you know, currency is for people you don't" distinction.

Barter is used when a previous currency system collapses. The currency is no longer guaranteed to be accepted, so people want hard goods that they know they can use. But barter is an unstable equilibrium: as you mentioned, currency is just barter where one particular good becomes so widely accepted that people will take it not because they want it, but because it can be traded for other things that they want. There are reports of the Bosnian War [2] that described how alcohol and ammo quickly became pseudo-currencies because they were universally accepted and could easily be traded for what you actually needed.

Graeber isn't wrong, but as an anthropologist he over-indexes on the within-group interactions. There are lots of documented examples of currency emerging spontaneously from trade between groups where the groups all mutually decided that one type of object had value.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708431

[2] https://www.scribd.com/document/664716931/How-I-survived-a-y...

I'm not sure your in group/out group thing really holds up. I think of your credit/wife examples as not "credit" but something like basic reciprocity, closer to barter.

I think it's just a bit of blurring of terms. In my mind, bullets and ammo are just not currency in the same way a coin is. You can call it a "pseudo-currency" but the pseudo is kind of cheating.

I'm also not sure "There are lots of documented examples of currency emerging spontaneously from trade between groups where the groups all mutually decided that one type of object had value" disproves the point about violence/government. Can't I do the "pseudo" move back at you? What is the mechanism of the "mutual decision"? Would it be unlike the ones that lead to states? It sounds like everyone agrees something has value so we can have a dispute resolution mechanism. The implication being if you don't agree the other choice is violence? What if I say this "spontaneous collective of groups" is a "pseudo-government"?

Where would that leave us?

Kind of like how the local church might traditionally manage birth/death/land records, but that doesn't mean the documents are sacred or a religious observance.

Well I mean technically they are always for credit purposes, even if they are the "default/convenient payment method"? That's part of the advantage, but it's still credit. You get to spend and pay later. It wouldn't be a very good evaluation for credit purposes if it didn't work like credit? Or am I misunderstanding you?

It's just to say that "credit" isn't just about an in vs out group anymore than debt is. Or anymore than "currency" is? I'm not sure how the distinction you make helps clarify that question. The point is why would credit be for people you know, and currency for people you don't? Isn't credit just a particular agreement around said currency?

1. I live in a village. I buy flour on credit from the miller, because I lack funds and they know I'll be able to pay them back after I sell my own textile goods at market.

2. I travel overseas to a store I've never seen before and I will never see again. I transact $100 on my credit-card purely because my debit card won't work for some reason. I leave with the goods, reminding myself to pay off the balance ASAP with funds I already possess when I get back to the hotel and a laptop.

Technically they both involve "credit", but it's not really equivalent. The first case involves a direct relationship in a community, while the second is indirect, a stranger trusting my card-company. In the first, incurring a debt is an intended feature, in the second the temporary debt is just a weird inconvenient quirk that I'd rather skip entirely because it makes more work for me.

In short, just because someone uses a credit card doesn't necessarily mean it's "credit" in the anthropological sense.

You said (emphasis added):

> We should be careful to distinguish when credit-cards are used for credit purposes versus the common scenario where they're just the default/convenient payment method and a debit-card could substitute just fine.

So it wasn't about "credit" in the anthropological sense, as credit cards are never used in such a way. Unless you are going to suggest there is some bifurcated way of using credit cards where one offers a more "direct relationship to my community". In short, my misread wasn't as you indicated - about failing to misunderstand something about credit cards. Rather it was conflating a general sense of "credit" (such as credit cards) with what they had meant, "I'm talking about "credit" in the David Graeber sense, where people effectively just remember who has done good things for them and reciprocate, not in the modern sense of credit cards and bank accounts." - which is what you term the "anthropological sense".

So I appreciate the nudge in the right direction, but I hope you see my point given what you actually conveyed. Thanks, have a good day!

Currency vs credit, as it was used some posts up is more like quantifiable vs not quantifiable. It's not about the exact catering expenses of parties thrown ("they had champagne, we have to invite them twice!") it's about inviting or not inviting. Not about the number of hours taking over the children, it's about being there when needed.

I do think that the development of currency is intimately connected with the development of government. The core problem government solves is dispute resolution, and I would bet that the majority of disputes come from transaction where one side does not hold up their end of the bargain. In small communities you just have the tribal elders adjudicate, but as you start doing more currency transactions between mutually-distrusting groups that can't agree on their authority figures, you need a system in place for dispute resolution. Cue states.

My point is simply that currency comes first. State formation is a consequence of extended trade networks transacting with currency, currency and trade is not a consequence of state formation. To my knowledge this is historically accurate, and there are a lot of examples of currency spontaneously arising without a state to back it.

Hell, cryptocurrency itself is a good example. We now have a viable transnational, trustless, instantaneous currency. We do not have a viable transnational trustless dispute resolution process. And we very much feel the lack, because crime and fraud is rampant in cryptocurrency transactions. Currency creates the problem that government solves. Creating a government that can go along with cryptocurrency is an unsolved exercise left to the reader.

I mean in the sense of, state formation was of such significance that I don't think you can say something like "currency came first" as if currency prior and post state formation is the same thing. It feels like the same sort of "pseudo-currency" with "currency" equivocation.

So if your model is - basic credit in that communal reciprocative sense, then you start trading with more distant outgroups, for this credit doesn't work, so everyone agrees on a currency, someone off in the distance doesn't agree, then states form to adjudicate disputes.

Then it is sensible as a primitive model, but I would just merely suggest that in the same way trying to say currency comes first is kind of a blurring the meaning of currency perhaps to the point of being a stretch, I think in this case to, it will be less orderly. One way this is blurred almost intrinsically in your articulation is via the term dispute resolution process. This could mean anything. It occurs to me that outright conquest and banditry is one way to resolve a dispute. Perhaps in places were there was "spontaneous" centering around a particular currency, this sort of violence was a predicate. I tend to think the need for violence and domination (and mitigations against the same) - what I think of when I think of states "resolving disputes" - was baked into the germ of humanity much earlier than what we might term "state formation". This gets back to the "pseudo-government" point I was trying to make earlier. I think of these things in parallel, rather than in sequence. If at their core humans are violent, such that they make violence, fear violence, and seek tradeoffs to manage violence, then this violence is a driver across currencies and states and trade networks, regardless of a determination of which "came first", if such a determination is even meaningful without greater specificity.

Similarly, I'm not sure if "State formation is a consequence of extended trade networks transacting with currency, currency and trade is not a consequence of state formation" is accurate in the same way. I suppose we have to unblur what "state" means.

I thank you for the back and forth though, which I enjoyed. I feel a need to do more reading on this topic, though I would guess much of these questions are not really falsifiable, as some of the answers are surely lost to history. Thanks, have a good day!

Thank you - brilliant

I don't necessarily buy the idea that someone with a chicken and needed bread wandered around looking for a baker in need of chicken, but their argument does fly in the face of the idea that barter follows failed currencies.

If nothing else you have a chicken and egg problem to unwind there, and barter does seem a bit more basic or simple than currency so I'd have guessed it came first.

You can watch both barter and currency develop in groups of children almost spontaneously.

IIRC, Graeber suggests that debt comes first. Initially it is tracked by memory, then when that gets too complicated, some kind of item is chosen to represent debt, which then in some cases evolves into currency. I believe this process has been observed.

The point is that they weren’t just used within a single group where everyone had access to more for the cost of only labor.

Sure it's evolved, but I don't see anything in your comment that really disputes the tie to force. Of course, taxation is connected to force. Additionally, as I addressed in another comment, a lack of modern "central authority" does not mean a lack of connection to "force" or violence. People can come up with distributed or atomized versions, which nevertheless arise under a similar tradeoff with respect to the fear of violence.

Speaking in terms of U.S. regulation and legislation, crypto is variously regulated as a "commodity" or as a "security" and therefore, cannot be formally considered a currency. The name, "cryptocurrency" is a marketing ploy, which cleverly seeks to dilute the meaning of the term, which is a term of art, and is still reserved, in legal circles, for things which are, in fact, currencies, and function as currencies, and are regulated as currencies, which crypto… is not.

It was rather painful to me in particular, because a few weeks ago, I registered and attended a municipal education session on fraud. And this session was co-hosted by an actual representative of the Arizona Corporation Commission - Securities Division. I can prove that because my prize for the session was an authentic, imprinted, ACC/SD pizza slicer! Anyway, as soon as she mentioned crypto and asserted it is a class of "currency" I tried to call her out, and I asked more than once, and being reluctant to turn the session into a referendum on her legal knowledge, I finally let her win. It was embarrassing.

Anyway, no, cryptocurrency has never been a currency. Not in the USA. Other nations may deem it as such, but I kind of doubt it so far. Please do not conflate real currency with crypto. They are distinct things that are easily distinguished. The consumer should not be deluded into thinking otherwise.

It's pretty restrictive. You couldn't just port bitcoin to a CRDT while keeping CALM. You'd have to rethink the economics around the constraints of what's possible to do in a distributed way. But maybe that would be worth doing anyway.

You don't need a government backed paper currency, you need a mint making precious metal coins. History has several examples like the mints at the Potosí silver mines or those by the East India Company that enabled trade without effective governments to back them up by just providing reliable coinage that spread to many other polities.

As long as there isn't some crazy inflationary force like colonizers arriving with an unlimited supply, we can use something as simple as beads or seashells for currency quite fine. It just means more labor overhead to create that currency in the first place.

Somalia operated on paper money valued at the cost of producing it

I think it's also the case that hard money is a different kind of phenomenon from paper money reflecting an entirely different philosophy concerning property and what it is. It reflects a natural law perspective in its most earthy and primitive form, which is that gold and silver are money because ancestors from time immemorial saw it as such due to certain intrinsic characteristics. Governments certainly regulated mints, but also marketplaces could and did regulate coinage on their own which is possible because of its physical nature. If a coin is clipped or made into a false alloy, that can be detected and corrected without state institutions.

Paper money by contrast tends to reflect more modern positivist theories of property in which property rights are deemed to exist because the state speaks those rights into existence. In the middle ages and even before, states as we know them now did not exist and could not exist, so positivism would have been absurd on its face, and its most direct application in the form of artificial currency could not be made.

The EIC's first mint was operational in 1643, long before it became a quasi-state. It started to become a quasi-government more than a century later, when it started raising its first major army in the 1750s culminating in the Battle of Plassey and didn't really have the resources to fully become one until the diwani in 1765.

How something comes to be is distinct from how it is used.

I was just thinking about click fraud, and how I'll bet that a significant number of clicks on sites are now being driven by simple (they don't need to be too complicated) LLMs.

[0] https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/Cut-Me-Own-Throat_Dibbler

Also, to the power of modern-day cryptography that rubber-hose and evil maid (backdoors) are the only viable (even if expensive) alternatives.

> the government disappears, there are really only two fundamental technologies needed to reboot everything: money and contracts

Both of which require "governance", but post-collapse, it may be of form that may not benefit the collective.

It doesn't prove the hardness assumption, if it did we could trot forward any toddler and ask if it knows the factors to some RSA product, and "prove" hardness assumption for factoring integers...

A high trust society. Everything else is downstream of that.

I'm not sure. I want to say there's volunteering, charities, clubs, religions etc. But those all need resources (time, energy, money) put into them to remain viable. I suppose if something is unprofitable it means the resources (money or not) are drained faster than they go in, and the entity dissolves.

It's predictable: The ROI of attacking cryptocurrencies in this manner is high enough to make expensive attacks worthwhile. It doesn't make other expensive attacks on typical end-users worthwhile, and they remain far-fetched.

If you bank with eg. Chase (biggest consumer bank in the US), you're not at real risk. In the hypothetical that the chase app is compromised, where does the money go? If the attacker moves the money to.. idk, US Bank, then US bank reverses the transaction and moves it out of the attacker's account. You can imagine hundreds of scenarios where the money is attempting to be moved to unregulated and irrecoverable destinations, but it doesn't exist at a scale that Chase et al. wouldn't be able to recover or accept the loss on to make customers whole (as is their responsibility).

You can't transfer "illions" to cash. You maybe can transfer it to a new bank - but then this same problem exists just one step away, with one more regulated institution to get involved. You can't suddenly fund/wire that money without a human calling you - if you try to wire even a much smaller amount, like <100k, as a random individual, then the bank will block the transfer and call you and ask about the money. If you're a corp that regularly banks in the "illions", you're not casually going to money launder. If you try to transfer it overseas, you're still in USD, so you're still in the regulated banking. Whoever exchanges that cash for a foreign currency is on the hook, and for "illions" of dollars, that entity is going to be regulated and behaving. This is all ignoring the fact that many banks and financial institutions will not accept an unexpected random large transfer (or thousands of smaller ones!) without some sort of audit or paper trail on the origin of the money.

As a mundane example, I recently bought a condo, and my bank required an in-person ID check to wire money over $25k, and then required me to later call and verify (twice) before I could start transferring my HOA payment to a random account. If you compromised my phone, that doesn't get you in-person with my ID in a branch, nor does that get you secondary confirmation over the phone (w/ a voice match check now!)

> which will disavow any responsibility as soon as they're on the hook for *illions

I haven't even touched on the political fallout if they disavowed responsibility, which is why all the regulations and KYC/CYA for the bank exists.*

The difference is that the western attackers go free, whilst the Chinese attackers will very likely be executed.

(Hagelin) Crypto AG.

Banking systems exist such as they do with the regulations that they do for a reason.

Would be good if Apple (or anyone) could have some kind of user-verifiable supply chain integrity thing, if they don't already.

I would've not dismissed the esim thing

like you do realize the Apple store scenario isn't on the same level, at all? like, you'd have to bascially stalk your target figure out when they're gonna go buy an iphone at some specific store and have all the SKUs ready, all for that one job vs. this where you can buy and resell these things and the cost is materials + labor for implanting the thing and shipping costs, and you don't really have to even identify your victims because your customers are likely wealthy (to a degree at least)

As long as the cost of sucha single-target attack isn't substantially below its potential upside, you should be safe.

Otoh, it's only meaningful if you have more than just toy assets in there.

There should be a range between those two though that would contain lots of folks comfortably.

Also known as buying a laptop, removing the WiFi card, and putting stock Ubuntu on it.

Yeah, the problem with "crypto hardware wallets" is the same as the problem with "secure phones for drug dealers" - they are an extremely juicy targets, you KNOW that any user of them is your target.

4G chips cost nothing and can be super small.

These Ledger hardware wallets are following the best security practices for hardware wallets and still got hacked.

Back in the day, RSA SecurID hardware tokens were completely physically sealed, with no room for a backdoor. Tampering with them in any ways destroys them or makes it physically obvious. That's a physically secure design. This Ledger thing looks more like a consumer toy.

I'd be curious if anyone on HN could confirm whether RSA quietly reissued new keyfobs. The safe assumption was the intruders got access to the TOTP secrets, but strictly speaking that was conjecture, unless that was later confirmed directly or indirectly.

This may have been a different incident, but at some point there was chatter about a possible physical intrusion targeting a TOTP backend server for DoD or defense contract systems (Lockheed Martin?).

I think really serious incidents tend to be more vigorously suppressed, unlike humdrum PII exfiltration, for the same reason that during wartime states don't want the enemy to have unequivocal confirmation about how successful an operation was, e.g. whether the secrets exfiltrated included credentials to specific systems.

I briefly tried to keep a list of these types of hardware-based authentication systems hacks. But it's a chore, especially following up.

https://smallhacks.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/reading-codes-fr...

Don't give out your account numbers, there will be a lot of hassle should an evil person get it. However you have a reasonable change of getting your money back in a couple years. (this is also why you get warning about some countries - a few will not cooperate with traces and so the money is lost)

Is that a US thing? In Europe, companies have their account numbers on their letter heads and websites, and people are quite comfortable giving out their account numbers.

https://www.quelle.de/service-hilfe/bezahlung-finanzierung/k...

1. Something electronic that kicks of the thing where I need to enter the “ID codes” from device or app; 2. Being present at the bank and having been ID’d;

The same attack on every desktop and laptop would be... significantly harder.

I'll give you a little hint - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

The only thing they are better is providing security in an easier way.

One example of subjectivity is if, and this happens, a bug is found which can drastically increase the supply of coins beyond the intent of the creators; everyone comes together and removes those state transitions manually despite their objective validity. A more practical notion would be some type of "this transaction was fraud, someone has authority to reverse it." Of course, this is a hard tradeoff, but users should be able to make it.

Yeah, it is totally great to have to set up a different account for every service, then having to do AML and KYC, and then having your account suspended for no apparent reason. So great that international transfers takes days and tens of dollars in fees, if they succeed at all. So great how a large part of the world‘s populace is denied access to the global financial system. Great as well how centralized it is, so things go down when there are technical problems at your bank. Absolutely awesome how Canada was able to freeze bank accounts of people who donated to the ”wrong“ cause.

They totally have it figured out, we should stop looking for alternatives. We already have the perfect system for the ages. Anybody who even tries is delusional.

Is it? The theory and even the implementation is literally a gas station credit card skimmer for crypto. I do agree that anyone dismissing attacks on Ledger was foolish, but mostly because Ledger is an obviously low-quality product on even a cursory inspection, not because we need to become even more paranoid conspiracy theorists.

--------------

From: Vincenzo lozzo

Sent: Monday, July 2, 2018 8:04 AM

To: [email protected]

Subject: Ledger wallet warning

Attachments: image1jpeg; Untitled attachment 00284.txt

In case you hold any coins in it, please don't spread this as they h=ven't released any of the information yet.

As for what is worth, the other wallets seem just as bad

--------------

Links:

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02501...

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02507...

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA008603...

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02505...

I always thought it is stupid to HODL using a hardware wallet. For HODLing, just get a random computer (no mailorder) and run debian13 with electrum (it is in the official repo, not an external package hence protected by standard debian safeties). Once you generated you keys, back them up and either wipe the machine, or at least airgap it.

Extra bonus: Raspberry pi 5 runs debian 13 out of the box.

ewww

Its slow, but it will never have been tampered with and can't be digitally cracked if you have multiple physical copies of the resulting seed.

I bought directly from ledger. I don't know if they were assembling devices in house at the time or not.

Edit: further context, this discussion is somewhat relevant to how confident they were. See the OP's remark about what ledger said: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ssycjn/my_l...

Every single time I thought maybe people on the internet know what they're talking about, I've been proven wrong. The internet is for entertainment purposes only.

The only educational exception has been people who weren't exactly posting on the internet, such as the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting videos or Stanford lectures.

There's a lot of grief can come from it, so I try and read this poem often. [0]

[0] https://gladdestthing.com/poems/ed

This is not a homogenous mass...it also keeps changing. The internet is just a medium. It's like saying people writing books know what they talk about. Doesn't make sense. Anybody can write on the internet or write a book

Nit: did it actually do OCR? Given the implant was embedded in a specific known device that probably used specifically known fonts, you'd think they could just do a lookup a character's block of pixels to read the screen.

What about ignoring proprietary hardware wallets, and implement your 'wallet' as a small, bare-bones, self installed debian system with enough empty disk space to be a full node, that stores the data on a dm-crypt volume? Buy the hardware in cash from a random used computer store. No it won't be as convenient and portable. But if you trust standards-based crypto, you can implement your own ssh tunnel or whatever to it from your other client devices. This also lets you take 1:1 disk clone images of the dm-crypt volume and safely back it up to remote locations at any time you want.

I've worked in payment terminal hardware security and this is not surprising to me at all.

This attack on the Ledger wallets would definitely rate as amateur in terms of sophistication in that world.

I don't have to think about any of this stuff when I am using the payment terminal at Kroger. We have well engineered systems that eliminate the need for being constantly on edge about every monetary transaction. I can lose my entire actual wallet and experience ~zero financial impact, even if a malicious party obtains it.

What happens if my wallet bricks itself due to some misconfiguration or environmental transient? I don't have to keep multiple redundant copies of my payment cards around just in case my physical wallet self destructs.

[1] “Newsnight” on BBC

[2] As in Diffie-Hellman etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitfield_Diffie

There are lots of security measures you can bypass if you pretend to be crazy within given bounds or simply stop acting sane.

I refuse to touch anything crypto with a ten-foot pole. I don't know if that makes me "paranoid", but it is certainly very easy. Just stay away from the thing doing drug markets, scams and rugpulls every month.

I think it's good to remember this is always the case. Attacks on tamper evident seals are commonly called "theoretical" or "lacking value" in practical terms, but recent customs evasion using counterfeit seals in the US shows that to be untrue.

Heck, The Wire had an arc about people bypassing customs tamper-seal tags.

That is the only way to ensure no "authority" can undo or correct legally made transactions.

How would this have helped here? The attackers included the radio. Most people don't have a faraday room at their disposal.

> For you're forced to not only upgrade the firmware but also install the Bitcoin "ledger app" (or whatever that is called) after you entered your seed into the device.

> Which is complete and total amateur hour.

How else would you incorporate protocol updates into your wallet? Although I do agree that it shouldn't be necessary to install these unless absolutely necessary to continue interacting with the blockchain network in question.