Most of us reading this post know the importance of using a hardware wallet to protect our bitcoin. We know to secure and protect our seed phrase. “Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins” is our mantra. But are they your keys if you have to trust the TRNG (True Random Number Generator) built into your hardware wallet?
It is true that quality hardware wallets like the Cold Card products are completely open source. That is great, but a guy like me does not have the technical ability to verify source code. So I have to trust (a dirty word for bitcoiners) other hodlers much smarter than me to check the code. Also, the secure element chip is not manufactured by the wallet company, so you have to trust the chip maker as well.
The alternative is to roll your own seed. It is a bit of a process, and you really should roll the dice at least 100 times to ensure sufficiently high entropy (randomness).
I admit I have not done this, but now I’m thinking about giving it a try. I wonder if most people on Stacker News do this, or do you trust the hardware wallet? Also, do people who use multisig think of rolling dice for each phrase to be overkill?