Fascinating read. A quote towards the end really struck me:
“ When basic entropy generation can cost more than most countries' GDP, maybe it's time to stop pretending this industry has grown up “
Yep. We haven’t even close seen the last of it. All these trad-fi ETF focused dudes have their head in the sand big time. A huge scandal is coming: a single miss placed or stolen key from a coin base insider will quickly and painfully rip away the blissful ignorance surrounding that space currently. Bitcoins history shows us time and time again that the only safe people in the space are the bitcoin-only self custodied.
I think too that is just another reminder to the doomers who somehow equate bitcoin ETF and trad-fi popularity to death of bitcoin or death of bitcoins message. Just because someone is shouting their message loudly into your ear doesn’t mean that your own message has lost footing or merit.
Did they generate their key using like python built in rng or something? HAHA. Or set_seed=42 as in all the examples??
That being said, someone going through and testing all the wallets generated from common rng packages, using seeds 0, 42, 100, 123, would probably yield some interesting results.
this is one of the craziest stories i've read.
hackers are absolutely going through and testing low-entropy generation tools, there was a defcon presentation on it a few years back so they absolutely are doing it now.
As far as their entropy, they could have taken dice from a gaming store or dice from a real casino, rolled the binaries themselves and generated very high entropy that way.
You still need a computer to produce the checksum but the entropy can be produced through nature... a shitton of dice rolls and be way better off.
set_seed=42as in all the examples??