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I wonder what the preferred way to generate the passphrase is? The issue with something like a Coldcard or Bitbox was that it takes ages to enter a long passphrase.
I wonder if a different approach could be employed between the entrop for the base seed and the passphrase? E.g. Use Dice and the Iancoleman BIP39 tool to generate the base seed, and then something else to generate a 12 word BIP39-compatible passphrase on top of that "just in case"?
Even if your base seed is totally compromised, you still have your funds.
Having it on a computer means it would be way easier to type it out...
You can use dice and use the list(s) provided at Diceware for a passphrase if you want to use a different list than the BIP39 one.
I wonder what the preferred way to generate the passphrase is? The issue with something like a Coldcard or Bitbox was that it takes ages to enter a long passphrase.
I wonder if a different approach could be employed between the entrop for the base seed and the passphrase? E.g. Use the Iancoleman BIP39 tool to generate the base seed, and then something else to generate a 12 word BIP39-compatible passphrase on top of that?
Even if your base seed is totally compromised, you still have your funds.
Having it on a computer means it would be way easier to type it out...
Yeah, one thing I've learned over the last few days is that for a passphrase to save you, it needs to be much longer than what can be comfortably (and reliably, repeatedly) be typed into any of these signing devices. But with a laptop keyboard at our disposal, or KeepassXC installed, it would be trivial to generate a passphrase with the appropriate entropy, and for it to be easily tested.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, and it sounds like we're landing in a similar place.
I've always felt that multi-sig is overkill and can go wrong in too many ways, and it is only the realisation that all hardware wallets are flawed in one way or another that has been pushing me reluctantly in the multi-sig direction. Since none of them can be trusted now to be bug-free for the lifetime of the wallet, are we forced into a complex multisig future?
The Tails+Electrum solution was proposed as one way to make one of the three less bad, and to ask the crowd whether it is indeed considered a viable option. Perhaps due to the whole influencer crowd and the incentives of the manufacturers in prominent places, I've heard very little of the "offline laptop+wallet" solution over the years. But the more I look at the ways multisig can go wrong (all the ways you cite, plus lost descriptors and the varying wallet derivation paths mentioned by @billytheked earlier), plus all the ways in which every hardware wallet is flawed, then the more I think that a single-signature offline laptop + wallet (Sparrow, Electrum, Wasabi) could be a way forward through all of this. Create your own entropy or use the battle-tested entropy of Linux; full control and ownership without outsourcing any security to a HWW maker; as many cheap backups as you like from multiple USB copies (presumably Clonezilla or dd could do this; would need to check).
Perhaps this is the way to go? Single sig plus passphrase, but on our own airgapped hardware.