No, I don't believe @N had malicious intent with the Coldcard entropy bug. Perhaps his CTO, but to me it sounds like the CTO wanted a change, the company needed an open source win when they were attacking open source so including an outside contribution seems like a narrow win for them. I believe that was done on purpose. I don't believe introducing a bug to steal bitcoin from people was the ultimate plan. NVK has been in Bitcoin from the white paper. He doesn't need to steal. He has plenty.
Bitcoin Core changed the datacarriersize to reflect the current network use cases and to keep the network healthy. Otherwise more out of band and back door negotiating for blocks would continue to happen.
Ultimately, BIP-110 folks were advocating for education, trying to convince people to switch to and run Knots to hinder non monetary transactions. They could have as easily made the education issue to add a variable to people's existing nodes and Core would function as it had previously. It would have accomplished the exact same thing. And it's even easier to do than running new software. Why wasn't that the educational issues? It would have solved it. The argument was "no one is going to change a variable, they'll just install and use defaults". Instead a harder and more complicated path was chosen and to do the other opponent had to be vilified.
But BIP-110 doesn't even work. People still spam. I've seen BIP-110 valid blocks with spam, songs, pics, and videos.
Could Core be corrupted? Sure. But looking at what Luke is doing, it's much, much easier to see who's corrupt here. Luke is sitting at the top of his Bitcoin fork and trying to control his Bitcoin fork and everyone below him. He wants to be King of Bitcoin. He can't. So he is making his own.
The most wild thing is all of that was predicted a year ago and he's now doing it!
I don't like miner centralization either. Stratum v2 and DATUM seem like amazing solutions. It's why I started mining with Ocean on day one of the company's launch. We need miner and block template decentralization badly.
Small companies shipping thousands of devices isn't odd at all. It's the American (or in this case Canadian) dream for a small business to be successful. And they WERE!
And no, I don't think a nation state is behind Coldcard. It's just a major fuckup being masqueraded as a conspiracy to make us feel better than one of our own could hurt us so badly and mostly because we all trusted when we tell people not to trust. We let ourselves down. It's easier to blame someone else than ourselves.
Every one of us that used a Coldcard and didn't download the firmware and test it and run it through AI before using it or recommending to a friend failed. It might just be that simple if we want to live our lives against a trust model.
Am I wrong and we're in the middle of the then thy fight you phase? Well, we don't know for many years. For now, I'm not going to dwell on it. That negativity isn't good for me or my family. I will use this as I always do to learn and growth. Everything is an opportunity.
I hope this answers your questions.
