M @Murrayer111

Multi-sig vendors use every public attack or exploit as an opportunity to push their services. While I'm not against multi-sig for the right scenario, it's worth reviewing how a properly set up single-sig wallet would have protected your bitcoin from this attack. 👇 On a technical scale from 1-10, this is a 4. A properly generated 12-word seed key has 128 bits of entropy. A 24-word seed has 256 bits. Both are unbreakable by any machine on earth. Adding a passphrase that acts as a 25th word to your seed phrase when generating keys provides additional entropy in a roughly additive manner. IE; 128 bits from 12-word seed + X bits from 25th word passphrase = total entropy BUT the amount of entropy added depends on HOW you chose the passphrase. Some examples; A purely random 8 digit passphrase using letters, numbers and special characters provides roughly ~52 bits of entropy. 10 digits = ~65 bits 15 digits = ~98 bits 20 digits = ~131 bits However in practice, humans aren't great at remembering purely random character strings. We tend to use passwords we can remember more easily. This benefits the user but weakens entropy in line with how simplified the password is... Example; Less secure -> RedSox69420 More Secure -> r3Ds0x$94@0 Cracking passwords or phrases is as much art as it is science. Since randomly guessing every possible combination of letters and numbers is computationally expensive and time consuming, attackers will focus on words and patterns that humans commonly use. The less secure password above may posses 65 bits of entropy but in practice it would be trivial to crack with a dictionary based attack. Avoiding such patterns is key to generating a secure passphrase that is difficult for a computer to guess. Still, a human generated phrase will almost always have less entropy than a purely random string of characters and we need to keep that in mind when choosing one. The same length phrase with a human chosen string will provide significantly less entropy on average; 10 digits = ~45-60 bits 15 digits = ~70-90 bits 20 digits = ~90-110 bits When adding a 25th word phrase to your wallet private key generation it's generally recommended to use at LEAST 15 characters that utilize the full key space of upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters (IE, &$^@) A 15-character passphrase with ~80 bits of entropy, added to a 12-word seed with 128 bits gives us ~188 bits of entropy. BUT here's the important part; By setting a secure phrase, even in the event that the seed is compromised you will STILL have the ~80+ bits of entropy protecting your private keys. ~80 bits of entropy is all one reasonably needs to make their secret practically uncrackable by any machine on earth. This simple added layer of security would have saved millions of dollars and heartache from hundreds of ColdCard users affected by the recent entropy exploit. Compromising a victims 12 or 24 word seed is useless to an attacker if the remaining 13th / 25th word passphrase is unbreakable on its own. While we should push hard on wallet developers to ensure that their code is free of such bugs, it's ultimately our own responsibility to set up our key storage in the most secure manner possible. We have to protect ourselves against errors as much as we do attackers. Just my 2 sats.

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M @Murrayer111

5 days ago

@BitPaine Agree...they will be caught

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M @Murrayer111

5 days ago

@deathcab 1000% - kudos for the common sense. These vendors ( & influencers) are the worst....always shilling some service/product under the guise of helping.