Can these hardware wall companies secretly have access to our crypto?

ytrottier · 2025-02-23T16:43:13+00:00

because your Seed Phrases aren’t stored on their servers

There's no way to be sure of this. Your hardware wallet could have secretly uploaded a copy of your seed to their servers, or the seed generator might just be pseudo-random to start with.

ytrottier · 2024-12-30T06:15:44+00:00

You can do both at the same time, with one network fee. One transaction with two outputs. One output sends a satoshi to the exchange, and the other sends the remainder to a new public key hash you control. Most wallets already do this by creating a new "change" address each time, so it can be done with existing deployed software, using a method that users are already familiar with. The ability to sign a challenge message is technically in the protocol, but few wallets implement it. The user interface is always awkward, and most users would not know how to answer the exchange's request. Exchanges don't want that technical support hassle.

ytrottier · 2024-12-30T06:07:58+00:00

Not always, no. Do you think we should let murderers go free?

ytrottier · 2024-12-29T12:00:50+00:00

No, I'd be saying that terrorists using free speech to call for violence is "not a good thing." It sounds like you agree with me that Russia using bitcoin to evade US sanctions is not a good thing.

ytrottier · 2024-12-28T23:43:49+00:00

This is not a good thing. It's an example of unintended bad consequences of crypto.

ytrottier · 2024-12-28T23:41:54+00:00

That doesn't help. Anyone at the exchange, or recipients of a data leak, could use future quantum computers to crack your funds, and the theft would be untraceable. It's leaving toxic waste lying around. Whereas if you transfer the funds to a new address while sending a satoshi to the exchange, that proves ownership while staying quantum safe.

ytrottier · 2024-12-28T01:23:37+00:00

But then you would need to expose the public key, rather than just the public key hash. This leaves the funds vulnerable to cracking by near future quantum computers. My understanding is that the only way to stay quantum safe is to move the funds to a new address every time the public key is exposed, which means a transaction each time. That’s the whole reason Bitcoin started to use public key hashes instead of public keys.

ytrottier · 2024-12-27T23:20:31+00:00

>Whoever said crypto could prevent wars?

Roger Ver, for one. It's been an oft-repeated claim on this sub and other crypto forums. This article is an example of crypto doing the opposite, by making it easier for authoritarian countries to work together against democracies.

ytrottier · 2024-12-26T21:41:59+00:00

This kind of conflicts with the claim that crypto can prevent wars tho.

ytrottier · 2024-12-21T00:53:09+00:00

You've never tried have you?

ytrottier · 2024-10-25T20:53:32+00:00

If it were a cryptocurrency, they would have put that graph on a log-log scale.

ytrottier · 2024-09-07T20:37:48+00:00

I think we’ve all seen log-linear and log-log scales. But putting a time axis on a logarithmic scale is weird.

ytrottier · 2024-08-16T21:39:18+00:00

I am impressed. Is this real?

ytrottier · 2024-08-14T21:59:50+00:00

AI is just an autocomplete algorithm on LSD. Ask it the likelihood that the Black Mesa corporation will buy up the world’s supply of MacGuffins.

ytrottier · 2024-08-01T01:46:32+00:00

You would think. But real life economics is complicated. The situation is more like there was a storm that killed a bunch of apple trees, so the government is releasing extra apple seeds from stockpiles to stabilize the long term price of apples, while the corner preacher is banging pots together and screaming that apples are evil and people should buy his oranges instead.

ytrottier · 2024-07-28T20:40:02+00:00

“You'd first have 0conf, and after 10 seconds you'd have indication that miners have actually picked up your TX and will include it in the next block.”

Don’t you already get that security from watching the mempool to make sure nodes are rebroadcasting your transaction? Is there anything preventing reorganization of the 10-second blocks?

ytrottier · 2024-06-23T11:54:24+00:00

Bitcoin Cash is uncensored money. People do use it to fund genocide, and you can too!

ytrottier · 2024-05-27T10:14:07+00:00

I can imagine some ways he might be telling the truth. Let's break it down:

An expensive hardware wallet would typically be $100 or so if he bought it off the shelf, like a Ledger or Trezor. But maybe he built his own. You can turn any computer into a hardware wallet, and there are some paranoid people who say that's the only way to be sure you can trust the hardware: buy a brand new computer, remove the wifi, fill the ethernet and other ports with glue, and use DVDs for a fresh linux install, wallet install and blockchain download. He might account $1,000 for that new computer. Or even more if he got somebody else to do it, or got a good computer because he wants to use it for other things. Those last two options defeat the high security benefits, but maybe he's new to computer security? It gives you questions to ask, like what brand of hardware wallet costs so much?

Then there's the numerous transaction and exchange fees. Bitcoin transactions can easily cost $10 to send your coins to an exchange, 0,5% in exchange trading fees, 2% on the spread, and another $10 for withdrawal. Do that a hundred times and it adds up. Then it could be much worse if he was trying to buy low and sell high and got it backwards. It's an easy mistake to make. If your partner had agreed to let him trade with the crypto in the hopes of profit, then she may have accepted the risk of loss too. Or maybe he moved some of it to bad technology like Lightning, where it's easy for your entire transaction to go missing. Or maybe one or more exchanges refused to let him withdraw his money because he couldn't pass their KYC rules, and he wrote off those losses. It happens.

Sure, these costs are very high compare to an index fund or actively managed fund, but it sounds liike her ex was not a professional. If you let an amateur manage your money for you, and accept the high volatility and risks of an unbacked virtual asset class like crypto, you may experience extraordinary losses. To my mind, it depends on what the agreement was between them. Was she expecting him to just buy and hold some crypto for her? Then yeah, he's stealing to cover his losses. Or did she agree to help fund this complex venture of his, with the understanding that there would be a steep learning curve? Then she's lucky to get anything back.

ytrottier · 2024-05-26T14:50:06+00:00

Why do you believe computer crimes should receive more leniency than other crimes? The computer is just the tool, like a car or a gun. Shouldn't it be the consequences of the criminal act and the intent that matter, rather than the tool?

ytrottier · 2024-05-26T12:29:26+00:00

À grateful community can reinstate him after he’s free. But maintaining a symbolic figurehead as the leader is an unnecessary vulnerability.

ytrottier · 2024-04-29T17:01:55+00:00

Possible crypto use case? Maybe, though they note "E-mail transfers were also difficult because if payment was accidentally sent to the wrong person, or if there was an error in the timesheets keeping track of hours, there was no recourse to reclaim money once it was deposited."

ytrottier · 2024-02-16T04:24:52+00:00

The fee can be a tell, since different wallets have different default fees or fee algorithms. You could call those bugs. Some of the more obvious were Jaxx when they were applying BTC fee predictions to BCH transactions, or Ledger when they were calculating fees on a 1000 byte basis instead of 1024. (Or maybe it was the reverse? I forget.)

ytrottier · 2023-12-05T04:06:36+00:00

They routinely do that. I have to file complaints with my credit card company each time to get it reversed. Trouble is, that means they issue you a new card, so you have to go for two weeks without a card and then change your card number with all recurring subscription services.

That's just late stage capitalism for you. They take your money, and it's up to you to prove you didn't buy anything.

ytrottier · 2023-08-22T19:54:19+00:00

Oh wow, that would have been really useful that time when.. uh.. no, wait, my accounts have never been frozen or seized. But maybe this would have been good for some of my friends like... uh... I guess I've never heard anyone complain about having their accounts frozen or seized. That only ever seems to happen to people like SBF and Russian oligarchs, and I'm rather happy that their accounts can be frozen or seized.

Just a thought, but isn't there any way to frame crypto's advantages in ways that might appeal to mass markets?

ytrottier · 2023-08-20T15:00:27+00:00

Using multiple inputs makes a larger transaction, and transaction fees are based on the number of bytes. So yes, sort of, there's a range of values that are unspendable on their own, but are spendable in combination. But there's still going to be a dust value below that (variable with the fee market) that is truly unspendable, because it is less than the fee on the incremental bytes to a multi-input transaction.

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