Inside the Coldcard Hack That Drained Over $100 Million in Bitcoin: Uneasy Money

A hardware wallet's 5-year-old randomness bug just let hackers drain over $100 million in Bitcoin. How many more waves are coming? Plus, Ethereum's fight over cutting ETH issuance.

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A firmware randomness bug buried in Coldcard's code since 2021 surfaced last week and has already drained over $100 million, an estimated 1,600 to 1,800 Bitcoin, across four attacker waves. Taylor Monahan makes the case that the culprit is not North Korea but professional GPU crackers, and explains why the dice-rolling ritual many early victims trusted still left them exposed.

Sonya Kim, co-founder of 3F Labs, and Mike Silagadze, founder and CEO of ether.fi, debate where DeFi's responsibility ends after trade.xyz's SK Hynix perp swung from $1,128 to $917 on a thin premarket print, then turn to Ethereum's own monetary policy fight.

That fight centers on EIP-8361, a proposal to cut ETH issuance that opened with only 48 hours for public comment, reviving the minimum viable issuance debate Sonya once worked through at Steakhouse. Silagadze calls cutting issuance economically unsound and warns it could push billions of dollars of ETH out of staking, while Kain Warwick argues the resulting chaos is good for an Ethereum governance culture that had grown too quiet. The conversation covers Coldcard's entropy failure, the dice rolls that did not save early victims, trade.xyz's oracle mispricing, and Ethereum's issuance fight.

Hosts:

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Host of Uneasy Money and Founder of Infinex and Synthetix

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Co-host of Uneasy Money and Security Expert

Guest:

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Sonya Kim - Co-Founder of 3F Labs

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Mike Silagadze - Founder and CEO of Ether.Fi

Timestamps

🔓 01:17 Coldcard's 5-year-old entropy bug resurfaces, over $100M in BTC stolen

🕵️ 10:26 Taylor argues it's not North Korea: this hack needs compute, not scams

🎲 21:00 The dice roll debate: why 50 rolls barely saves your seed phrase

📱 27:14 Cape: Get 33% off your first six months with code 'unchained' at https://cape.co/unchained

📉 27:39 SK Hynix oracle glitch on trade.xyz reignites the platform-responsibility fight

🔗 42:24 Aave retreats from multichain sprawl as EIP-8361 issuance fight erupts

🧠 51:26 Mike on why cutting ETH issuance would push billions of dollars of ETH out of staking

🔥 53:05 Sonya's fix: burn fees for the same effect without cutting issuance

🌀 01:05:20 Kain's take: fragmenting the EF into chaos is actually healthy for ETH

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