I'm a big fan of hardware wallets, mainly used the coldcard and it truly is amazing.
But one thing that potentially kept me up at night was the trust of seed generation. I know you can do dice rolls and all that but you are still trusting that it is a genuine random seed that is being generated.
should we normalise an offline seed generation process, with something like borderwallets.com along with either a python code or seed tool - bitcoiner.guide/seed for checksum and verifying?
i think its a rewarding process to follow as gives you lots of information and you know that you have picked the seed in a randomized way.
In cryptography (the original 'crypto'), it is said: don't roll your own cryptography.
We should also normalise 'don't roll your own dice': https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/87982
That Man vs Machine game is actually kinda fun. I did lose against the machine but once I understood what was going on it wasn't that hard. Here's my score.
Man 425 44.32 - Machine 534 55.68To be honest I don't think this game is actually proving much. If anything it seems like you need to be less random to win.
We have dedicated hardware that solves this because humans are useless, without lifting a finger: https://www.st.com/resource/en/application_note/dm00073853-stm32-microcontroller-random-number-generation-validation-using-the-nist-statistical-test-suite-stmicroelectronics.pdf
"I know you can do dice rolls and all that but you are still trusting that it is a genuine random seed that is being generated."
What exactly are you 'trusting'? That physics works correctly in your apartment? Even if dice is not ideally balanced it is not a big deal.
If you refer to 'does device use the rolls I typed in?' question - with seedsigner you can verify it yourself. They publish code that reproduces deterministic on-device process and you can verify that for given rolls you get given address.
I think dice rolls are pretty good. Put them in a box and move and spin the box like crazy for 1 week. Then you have a random number 😃
I created what is hopefully a straightforward dice-to-seed-phrase worksheet. Check it out.
http://bitcoinhandson.com/dice
I'd love to get some feedback on it, in terms
- is it easy to follow?
- any holes in the logic?
Here's the first page (instructions and worksheet at the end).
Nice find!
That's why I made this: https://21baller.com/
Totally trustless seed generation
Check back in a week or so and we should have our btcpay server back up
With coldcard you can verify that device used the provided dice-roll seed. They have python script that can reproduce hardware derivation on you PC via python script.
yes again, i love the coldcard! I think border wallets offers a great way to generate offline seeds and have it so that you can leave bits of paper laying around and not be too worried!
ofc should also keep steel backup!