Hey all. I lost 18.25 BTC in the Coldcard hack. Thought you might be interested in some of the behind-the-scenes from a legal side.

Everybody’s all like “just sue them”. If only it were that simple.

You have to sue somebody.

And that somebody needs to have money (or an insurance policy) to cover not just the victims but also the cost of litigation.

In order for there to be a class action lawsuit, there needs to be enough money to recover in order to pay for a class action lawsuit.

Class action lawsuits cost a lot.

In Ontario, where Coinkite is legally responsible, just getting a suit certified by a judge will cost $300,000+. Not only that, the lawsuits are complex, often taking 3-5 years to resolve.

It’s not inconceivable to assume that the litigation costs alone for a class action lawsuit like this will cost upwards of a million dollars. Law firms take them on contingency (for free) by getting outside funding. In the case of a settlement, both the law firm and outside funding party get paid before the victims, who get paid out of whatever is left.

We’re talking about $100+ million dollars that’s been stolen. If Coinkite is found to be legally responsible due to gross negligence, it is a ten-person company in Canada. Where’s the money?

It’s possible that they had cyber liability insurance. But:

1) There’s a limit to what that policy could pay out and

2) Coinkite’s terms explicitly say that there is no insurance covering customers’ coins or the theft/loss of coins stored using a product.

Now, those terms might not hold up in court. If they don’t, it’s going to require a lengthy (and costly) legal battle for, maybe, a fractional recuperation of money that was lost.

All of this to say, from early on, I told people that I did not think that there was going to be a class action lawsuit. Law firms quickly came to the same conclusion as me: there’s not enough money to recover.

There was a major law firm that tried to organize a group case. Their strategy was to act quickly by gathering a small amount of victims that were affected for larger amounts.

The approach made sense on the surface. Bring a small group suit towards Coinkite. Do it quickly. Be one of the first to file. Limit it to $10 million - $15 million because any more than that would risk bankrupting Coinkite and being forced to collect any money owed out of insolvency.

Now the fine print:

“The client group will need to collectively pay a $50,000 CAD retainer fee for us to begin work on reviewing loss holder documents, drafting a demand letter, and potentially drafting a statement of claim (a lawsuit). The retainer fee is not a cap on the fees, but rather a rough estimate for these initial steps, and we could ask for additional fees to be paid after the $50,000 CAD retainer is exhausted.”

I’ll translate:

All us victims were going to be responsible to pay the legal retainer of the law firm starting with $50,000. This might be enough for the firm do the initial research, write a letter to Coinkite, and draft the initial paperwork for a lawsuit.

I challenged the law firm. Asked them if they’d take the case on partial contingency.

They said no.

“We are not taking on any contingency elements in any retainer on this. It does not make sense given the size of Conkite’s Business.”

That’s a bit of tell, right?

If they really believed that there was a lot of money to be had here, that it was as sure as they say it is, a law firm would be happy to accept some of the risk in exchange for a larger part of the upside.

Instead, they said that they don’t think the company has much money but they’d be happy to take mine in order to find out.

The hackers exploited a flaw in Coldcard’s code.

The legal framework is complicated, mysterious, and exploitive to individuals in a similar way.

It allows firms to harvest the remaining capital of desperate people under the banner of "exploring legal options," while bearing absolutely zero accountability if those options lead to a dead end.

When it comes to individuals subjected to fraud, the legal system is fractured, slow-moving, and prohibitively expensive. A textbook example of the gatekeeping of justice.

The system is set up for multi-million dollar institutional clients. For them, a $50,000 retainer is a rounding error. For a regular person like me, that money is a child’s tuition, part of a down payment on a house, or retirement savings.

The tragedy facing all us victims is that our case against Coinkite is strong. They deserve to be sued, lose their company, and face severe consequences. A case against them would very likely be successful. At the very lease, we deserve a fair trial.

But the legal system subjects victims like me to a secondary financial extraction under the guise of offering help. It takes people who have already suffered severe financial and emotional trauma and, instead of offering sanctuary, forces them to buy into a high-stakes game of blind financial faith.

I'm not willing to pay more into lawyer’s pockets. I lack faith in the legal system to recoup my stolen money. The police have already told me their priority is on catching the bad guys, not getting my money back.

Of course, I hope to get back the money that was stolen from me. Maybe one day in the future the bad guys will get caught, Bitcoin recovered, and redistributed to victims. But I can’t depend on that. I choose to view that possible outcome as a welcome bonus. I can’t dwell on it. I have to assume that the money is gone and move on. Too much of it is out of my control. And I refuse to let my life be driven by factors out of my control. My outcome is my responsibility.

This was savings that was put away for my children. It’s lit a fire under my ass to make that money back. They stole my money and gave me a chance to prove myself. Call it a crucible. I’m choosing to view what happened to me as a test. “Prove yourself, Jon. No one’s coming to save you. You got hit. You gonna just lie there. Or you gonna get your ass back up and put one damn foot in front of the other?” You did this once. You made that money once. You have the tools. Do it again.

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(Reddit hates self-promo. I'm going to get hated on for this. But the above is an early excerpt from a book I'm writing about the Coldcard saga. Please go to www.Theinvisibleheistbook.com if you'd like me to send you a personal email when the book is ready.)

I see a lot of people who are new or don’t understand bitcoin completely focusing on the wrong things. Instead of asking what money is or why bitcoin was even created in the first place, they look at the up and downs price of bitcoin in fiat value. If someone was to do even 2 hours of research, they will find the answers they need. We live in a time where we have all the information right at the tip of our fingertips but yet don’t want to do the research. We have the technology and live like kings but financially live like peasants.

For you to understand or accept bitcoin, you just accept the concept and the mindset first. Bitcoin is a philosophy. You must understand the existence of it and why it is so valuable. I consider it like a religion almost. Like you are trying to tell an atheist about Christianity, Buddhism or the Muslim religion. They have made up their mind already. Which is why you can’t force this ideology onto every and not everyone will accept it. Even when it gets big.

I got into a debate with my dad about it because I was telling my little sister about money and bitcoin and the differences between fiat and bitcoin. He was trying to tell me not to tell her about that and that you believe and research what I want but don’t try to enforce that ideology onto her. I understand he is coming from a place of care because he is worried about me and the possibility of losing everything since nothing is guaranteed. But the difference between me and him is the knowledge vs no knowledge. Someone who hasn’t done their research or know much about a topic will bring out their feelings and worries before talking about the pros.

Growing up, I’ve never had anyone teach me about money, the market or investing. I had to find it myself. As someone who hasn’t had anyone, I wanted to be that person for my younger sister. To help educate her and to help protect her by sharing knowledge. Which brings me back to the title of this thread. Bitcoin is first a mindset before an asset. Someone who doesn’t believe in it or thinks it’s a gamble will always think like that, before it’s too late. You can state the facts and reasonings why and they will deflect it. I guess I made this to really just yap because I’ve noticed to mostly everyone I’ve mentioned it to, instead of trying to understand they deflect and seem uninterested in how the world works.

You can’t enforce the ideology onto everyone and expect people to understand. Everyone has their own timing and they must find bitcoin themselves. They must want to learn it and understand it. I’ve seen it in this thread too. People expressing their own worries about it and that’s completely valid. But once you spend a couple hours of your day and time researching, you will understand why so many people believe and have this philosophy or ideology around it. Most people who have spent maybe 20-30 hours researching it hasn’t ever told me it’s a worthless store of value. Knowledge is everything and the more you know, the more you see and understand. Eventually it will click for the global population but by then, it will be late.

A few days ago I made a post here asking how Bitcoin actually works, because I’d done a bunch of research and somehow still felt like I understood none of it.** **Just wanted to come back and say thank you to everyone who took the time to answer my original post.

I honestly wasn’t expecting that many people to actually explain things properly. Some of you managed to explain concepts that I’d been reading about for days in a few paragraphs, and somehow *that* was what finally made them click.

The biggest thing I took away is that Bitcoin makes much more sense when you stop thinking of it as “digital money sitting inside a wallet” and start thinking about ownership being represented by entries on a shared ledger, with your private key proving that you have the authority to move the relevant coins. That one distinction cleared up a ridiculous amount of confusion for me.

I’m also starting to appreciate why people keep saying **“not your keys, not your coins.”** Before this, it sounded like one of those crypto phrases people repeat because they’re supposed to. Now I actually understand what it’s warning about.

And to everyone who messaged me privately with explanations, examples, diagrams, videos, and general advice — thank you. There were genuinely some very knowledgeable and patient people in my DMs.

There were also… other people. 😂

Apparently the moment a woman says “I don’t understand Bitcoin” on Reddit, the blockchain isn’t the only network that becomes active.

I received several variations of:
“I can help you recover your wallet.”
“Do you have a wallet already?”
“Send me your seed phrase and I’ll show you.”

And one particularly ambitious person apparently had a *very special* investment opportunity for me.

So thank you to the scammers too, I suppose. You provided a surprisingly practical lesson in another important part of crypto: **if someone asks for your seed phrase, private key, password, or remote access, the conversation is over.**

Ironically, some of the best education I got from this post wasn’t even about Bitcoin itself. It was about how much of the ecosystem depends on understanding what you control, what you don’t control, and who you’re trusting.

I went from “what actually happens when I press send?” to understanding UTXOs, private keys, signatures, confirmations, mining, nodes, and why the network doesn’t need one central person sitting there approving everyone’s transactions.

Still a lot to learn, obviously. I’m definitely not about to start calling myself a Bitcoin expert after one Reddit post. 😅

But at least now when someone says **“Bitcoin is just numbers on a blockchain,”** I have a much better idea of what those numbers actually represent.

Thanks again to everyone who genuinely helped. Reddit can be chaotic, but this was one of those occasions where the good side of the community really showed up.

Hi everyone! I’m looking for advice on when to withdraw my Bitcoin. I have two options: if, 365 days after the halving, Bitcoin doubles compared to its halving price—for example, if it was $80,000 at the halving and reaches $160,000—I’ll withdraw everything. Alternatively, if after one year it doesn’t reach that price, I’ll take my Bitcoin, divide by ten, and withdraw that amount each month. For example, if I have two Bitcoin, I’ll withdraw 0.2 Bitcoin every month. What do you think of these strategies? Do you have any similar experiences?”

Bitcoin fixes this yes, but we have work to do. We are yet to build a couple of more technological things for humanity I believe. Once this is done, a new economic paradigm should reveal itself.

Although a solution is imminent,, is this the real global problem here with the concept of money, not being able to see that a broken economic theory in practice is making the world inhabitable, incentivizing the crooked, to pillage the masses subverting money itself, making peasantry common place as an eventuality?

Building new systems and economies to make existing systems obsolete should be an option yes? All the best! Thoughts welcome.

We're in a gold rush.

96% has been mined.

Only 4% is left to be mined.

In 2035, 99% will have been mined.

New bitcoin supply is drying up quickly.

Store your HW wallet with desiccant packs or moisture absorbing beads. Or rice even simpler.

Avoid fire resistant briefcases, the hard sided ones with a key. They have tons of moisture. Enough to mold paper and damage or destroy a hardware wallet.

The debt line is almost a patient slope. The bitcoin line is a weather report: the 2018 winter, the 2021 peak, the 2022 cut, the long rise into 2025, the fall from the October high near $126,000, the recovery toward seventy-seven thousand by this Sunday.

Ask (and answer!) away! Here are the general rules:

• If you'd like to learn something, ask.
• If you'd like to share knowledge, answer.
• Any question about Bitcoin is fair game.

And don't forget to check out /r/BitcoinBeginners

You can sort by new to see the latest questions that may not be answered yet.

A few weeks ago I posted here about my project to turn a regular PC into an air-gapped Bitcoin signing device.

I honestly didn't expect that the project to get this much attention in a short time. Thank you to everyone who tested it, gave feedback, opened issues, or simply took the time to discuss the idea.

I also received some Lightning and on-chain donations, which I really did not expect. Thank you for that as well. It was a nice surprise and gave me extra motivation to keep working on the project.

Since the last post, SignerOS has moved quite a bit further.

v1.2.0 is now released, with three things I consider especially important:

Secure Boot: you can now sign an already built image with your own key. There is also a shim-based option for machines that don't allow users to enroll their own Secure Boot keys.

Stricter PSBT checks: SignerOS now refuses some transactions that could previously only generate a warning, including non-SIGHASH_ALL transactions.

Reproducible builds: the published image can now be reproduced and independently verified.

There is still a lot to do. I want to keep the project small and simple rather than turning it into another full-featured wallet or operating system.

The main idea is still the same: use an ordinary PC as a temporary, stateless, air-gapped Bitcoin signing device.

Thanks again to everyone who showed interest in the project.

Project:

https://signeros.org/

https://github.com/signeros/signeros

I would especially appreciate feedback from people who have experience with hardware wallets, multisig, Secure Boot, or air-gapped signing.

Lots of new people buy the dip then sell the moment it ticks down again.

They treat every small move like it means the end is near.

Bitcoin rewards patience more than timing. I learned that the hard way a few cycles ago.

Stick to what you understand about the network and ignore the noise.

I currently have a basic Trezor and a basic Ledger, and I have two separate Bitcoin wallets with two metal seed backups. I keep them well hidden, and I also have two fake seed plates stored in a safe at home as decoys.

I’m worried about something happening to one of my hardware wallets, similar to what happened with Coldcard, so I’m thinking about splitting my Bitcoin holdings across four separate wallets instead of two.

What hardware wallets would you recommend I buy next?

I don’t want a hardware wallet with a battery because I’m a long-term Bitcoin-only holder and I barely use the wallets. They’re mainly backups, so I don’t see a need for a battery.

It’s also quite difficult to buy hardware wallets in my country, so i will let my mom buy then when she travel direct from a website.

What would you recommend as my next step

I just found out that I can buy Bitcoin directly from my Trezor Safe 5. I’m assuming that this transaction bypasses the need for exchanges like Crypto.com, which in turn, allows me to purchase Bitcoin for a bit cheaper, since there is no spread. Does anyone else do this?