As one who tries to educate people on the practical implementations of Bitcoin I deeply feel for everyone who has been affected by recent events.
During our courses we always warn people about third party risks especially when it comes to everything related to the private keys (generating, storing and interacting with them).
As a Coldcard user myself it appears that exactly this knowledge has saved me during this dumpsterfire.
Still it is not practical to onboard millions of people with dice-rolls, knowledge about cryptography and the staggering amount of risks that you have to be aware of as a user, knowing that no one can save you if things go sideways - individual responsibility.
As you can tell my „bitcoin fixes this“- goggles have come off a long time ago but I still am convinced that both bitcoin and Bitcoin can help the individual in several ways.
This has not been the first time a (wallet) software failed and it probably will not be the last time.
Reading posts like “bitcoin is dead“ and „bitcoin failed us“ are not helpful in this situation and more importantly are frankly wrong.
As harsh or unfair as it sounds: bitcoin is working exactly as intended - Irreversible transactions depending on cryptography. The incident shows exactly that.
The malicious piece in this equation has been a faulty piece of code responsible for creating cryptographically sound Private Keys on the affected devices. It has nothing to do with the protocol itself or the principles bitcoin is built on.
I agree though that maybe bitcoin the human network could have been stronger and this is my learning for the future: I will try harder to warn especially interested newcomers of the risks involved with third parties.
My hope is that everyone moves forward working on making sure it will not happen again. Each one can do that in his own realm.
Stay vigilant.
