physical-bitcoin-attacks

The tradeoffs of the design itself sacrifice payee safety and philosophically imply that the lives of its users are secondary to socially engineering goals which they dishonestly deny are incompatible with same. https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks That is objectively, justifiably classifiable as manipulative and destructive. To clarify: I assert that taxation and a functioning state, and the safety and security of the users of an online currency are absolutely not incompatible with one another—and I'm not even implicitly asserting that the definition of a "functioning state" is some kind of weird ancap impossible libertarian ideal.

> The developer signing the build provides sufficient guarantees. There are tons of documented cases of people resorting to physical attacks to obtain valuable cryptographic signing keys stored in full in one place. https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks I can only guess the people painting targets on their backs that big are woefully unaware of it, or living in deep survivors bias. Trusting control of the entire internet to the laptop memory holding the PGP signing key that signs debian packages of GCC was always an insane thing to do, and still is. Imagine what happens when one of those maintainers decides they like bribes or do not like being hit with rubber hoses. Quorum signing of full source bootstrapped deterministic builds completed on independently owned and geo-distributed hardware produced by different vendors is cur

To counter the dismissal of general hardware as a cold wallet, your view on threat models itself is a bit hopeful. Best summarized by xkcd, https://xkcd.com/538/ Having a dedicated device that screams "hey I have bitcoin" is almost always going to be more of a risk than a dedicated general compute device of plausible deniability. A device such as a phone with wireless and usb data disabled, encrypted, accessing data stored in an app that has it's own encryption on top. Its cute to romanticize the idea that some threat actor will be up against some impossibly secure device, the reality tends to be a lot simpler https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks especially if they find you have dedicated hardware with the sole purpose of securing crypto.