YHK - yet another hacker news clone

I don't care about cryptocurrencies but I've always been fascinated by the cryptography behind it. I've also dabbled with hardware wallets for non-cryptocurrencies stuff: like U2F auth.

The idea of a master secret that is behind a secure element which I control and which I can duplicate is amazing to me (as opposed to, say, "your" passkeys which Google/Microsoft/Apple can basically backup and transfer to other devices for you).

But really to me in the cryptocurrencies world people have been sold the lie that a hardware wallet was secure: it's not. It could be tampered with (as happened in this hack, where an additional rogue chip reading the screen and then sending it using an eSIM steals the secret) but it can also contain a bug (like the recent Coldcard exploit where Coldcard hardware wallets fell back on a RNG with only 32 bits of entropy and some dark-hat hacker cracked those and stole Bitcoins) and, most of all, the vendor of the hardware wallet itself can do nasty attacks (like "kleptography").

From the very start everybody in the ecosystem should have pushed of "n-of-n" schemes (say even just 2-of-2), where one secret goes on a hardware wallet from one vendor and the other secret goes on a hardware wallet from another vendor.

For years and years the tune has been: "PCs cannot be trusted, use a hardware wallet" but it mislead people.

PCs indeed cannot be trusted but unsuspecting users should have learned how to use 2-of-2 or 3-of-3 schemes, to become immune from hacks affecting one hardware wallet vendor.

The typical, non-sensical, response to this is the idiotic: "but if you have two secrets, if you lose one of them you lose everything". It's totally idiotic for people basically save a list of 24 words (the "seed", which is the master secret). Well, guess what: instead of saving a list of 24 words, you save a list of 48 words. Exact same thing, just twice longer.

That's my take: the entire "your coins will be safe if you use a hardware wallet" was misguided.

Dogs = cryptocurrencies. Fleas = scammed.

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https://grandideastudio.com/portfolio/security/ledger-hardwa...

They should have posted the weight with and without the device in it.

Also: never leave empty space in a hardware key, pot the whole thing in epoxy.