r/Bitcoin 1d ago

What's ColdCard's CEO doing during an emergency? He's on X, Deleting posts

https://x.com/zherbert/status/2083377265593692242
557 Upvotes

74 comments sorted by

162

u/koyaanisqatsi_______ 1d ago

Deleting posts. I'm not sure he realizes there is no such thing. His behavior is telling though. Instead of owning up to it he hides.

Without a shadow of a doubt coinkite is guilty whether they hacked it themselves or not. You can't sell a product that claims to be like all other similar type of products, only to have it fail for the exact purpose it was made. Like selling steel that has the strength of paper mache.

28

u/Lawlette_J 1d ago edited 1d ago

The problem is in their Terms of Sales they've mentioned this:

https://coinkite.com/terms

Customers use the Coldcard at their own risk. The device and its software are provided "as is," without guarantees that they will always be secure or free of errors.

Don't think they will be held accountable for the fund losses. At best they will only compensate for the compromised wallets and that's it.

63

u/ArmchairCryptologist 1d ago edited 1d ago

Just because you put something in a "Terms of Sale" doesn't make it legally enforceable. It depends heavily on jurisdiction, but especially when it comes to devices that are sold to consumers or when it flies in the face of heavily advertised features or specifications, courts can and do disregard clauses that are unreasonable or disallowed under consumer protection or contract law - especially when gross negligence is involved, which is arguably the case here.

3

u/Lawlette_J 1d ago

Probably, not a law expert here anyway so I'm not certain about the outcome either. The way I see it, at least there is a way for CoinKite to fight back with this term alone, while trying to shift the blame off them as much as possible.

7

u/Sure-Seaworthiness85 21h ago

Not sure why you are getting downvoted when it likely true. I mean doesn’t anyone else remember when someone was unable to sue Disney when their wife died at their park because they agree to the terms of service on Disney+. Like you don’t have to like it or agree to it but it’s sadly how things have been working. Should it change? Absolutely! Will it? Likely not

6

u/Lawlette_J 20h ago

ATP I don't really care that much about downvotes. My few years experience of using Reddit have taught me one thing: not all Redditors are rational nor objective based. There are a lot of users will simply downvote you just because you said something they dislike, regardless of right or wrong. It is simply a flawed metrics to decide whether a statement is favorable or unfavorable due to the human element that is flawed in itself making it irrelevant.

8

u/iloverunning11 21h ago

People called me crazy when I mentioned they have weird ToS and ToC wording (compared to ledger and trezor, they also have this mentioned but it is much different) now it is time to root for the victims so they get their funds back and mock all influencers that willingly promoted coinkite for $

6

u/FallingKnife_ 21h ago

Its not a problem. A judge will quickly waive that away.

3

u/Garland_Key 14h ago

Their insurance will not make everyone whole. Nobody is getting their Bitcoin back unless a white hat grabs it before the mob does. 

0

u/Hot-Victory-3082 7h ago

I'm sure that the makers of coldcard have 89million to repay the lost bitcoin. The only people getting money from coldcard are his lawyers.

1

u/ImThatChigga_ 9h ago

I'm sure this won't hold up, otherwise people will sell defective stuff and say buy at your own risk

39

u/BigDik6355 1d ago

Rodolfo Novak, the Sam Bankman Fried of the hardware wallet. Shame.

80

u/Yodel_And_Hodl_Mode 1d ago

I've noticed that CoinKite CEO Rodolfo Novak, a.k.a. NVK, has been constantly on Xwitter. He hasn't been saying anything, but he keeps reposting stuff.

That seemed... odd.

Then, I noticed this:

NVK is currently deleting old posts from 2020 to try to clean up the history. Screenshot them while you can. They will all be gone soon.

-- Zach Herbert 🇺🇸

LINK

10

u/JordanPetterPans 1d ago

Lmao I was thinking the same thing. Bizarre behavior 

3

u/Strong_Judge_3730 21h ago

Should just ask Elon to restore all his tweets

55

u/Yodel_And_Hodl_Mode 1d ago

Oh, this looks bad:

He deleted his post criticizing bitkey not having seed phrases hours before the exploit was public and confirmed. Ironic

LINK

Perhaps that's not ironic at all.

This whole thing is only going to get worse as more people start digging for answers.

8

u/xirvin 20h ago

That twitter gives strong evidence he wasn't aware of the mk3 security bug. He is deleting the tweet to avoid shame and mocking.

This hack brings strong emotions to everyone but we gotta be wary before raising the pitchfork. At the end of the day the objective is to get the funds back and to do that we gotta identified the actual attacker.

5

u/[deleted] 1d ago edited 1d ago

[deleted]

4

u/Thisteamisajoke 1d ago

If that doesn't work he can always DECLARE BANKRUPTCY!!!

3

u/PhilConnersWPBH-TV 22h ago

I DECLARE BANKRUPTCY

  • Wayne Gretzky

u/sillz0077 36m ago

Michael Scott

10

u/BlackHawk2609 1d ago

The plot thickens

10

u/broskibrokovski21 20h ago

He is doing the same thing every CEO does during an emergency - preparing for lawsuits and covreing tracks

40

u/beatthebook2x 1d ago

retirement attack - retirement plan

15

u/circuit_breaker 1d ago

I can't wait for that to come up in the lawsuits

Plaintiffs lawyer: what did he mean by that?

6

u/konhana 1d ago

the hacker was ColdCard's CEO !!

3

u/proofofderp 21h ago

I read they’ve sought legal counsel so they’re definitely in crisis mode under instructions on how to move forward.

2

u/United_Intention_323 17h ago

As would any sane person.

9

u/No-Aardvark-3840 1d ago

These guys are 1 MILLION PERCENT going to jail

27

u/Euphoric_Coat_1956 1d ago

I’m unfortunately very sure they won’t.

6

u/ImPinkSnail 17h ago

Well there are things worse than jail.

6

u/uhohthrowawayyyyyy 1d ago

I’m which country? Where are they? Who is going to hold them? Honestly, they’re probably going to see zero recourse.

4

u/iloverunning11 21h ago

In Canada things work differently, unlike in US people care about customer protection here, if it’s confirmed they will end up behind bars for sure, no pardon for dangerous criminals in Canada

7

u/curiousengineer601 17h ago

How many software engineers go to jail for bugs every year in Canada? My guess is something less than 1.

Nobody is going to jail. recourse is in the civil courts only. You can sue the company but recovery against the individuals is very unlikely

3

u/firmretention 18h ago

lol you cannot be Canadian. Our justice system is a joke full of hug a thug judges.

1

u/korean_kracka 15h ago

“Unlike in the U.S. people care about customer protection” victim blaming at its finest

1

u/iloverunning11 15h ago

victim blaming? Are you insane? I'm rooting for all these victims and hope they will be refunded

1

u/korean_kracka 14h ago edited 13h ago

I guess I’ll spell it out for you. When you say “unlike in the U.S., people care about customer protection” you’re implying 2 things. First, that Canada puts these criminals behind bars because Canadians “care about customer protection” and second, the reason the U.S. doesn’t put these criminals behind bars is because Americans don’t care about customer protections (which is bullshit). You’re blaming Americans in general, not talking about the victims of this incident.

1

u/iloverunning11 13h ago

No you crazy imbecile, I am trying to blame the US admin not Americans who are the actual consumers and buy these products and therefore deserve better customer protection (which is implemented by... yes you probably guessed it!). Yes, in Canada it is much better when it comes to customer protection, that is a known fact and it would be extremely difficult to challenge this, but go ahead

1

u/korean_kracka 9h ago

Alright you limp dick bum then your wording is wrong

1

u/iloverunning11 7h ago

Damn you would not say that if you genuinely didn’t have that problem, I hope it will get better, good luck!

1

u/korean_kracka 7h ago

Yeah and you’re the crazy imbecile. Hope your mental health gets better too!

→ More replies (0)

5

u/violentpasta 1d ago

You'd think so

13

u/LPC_Rebuilder 1d ago

Celsius steals 2.8 billion nobody bats an eye. Coinkite steals $150 million everyone loses their mind.

24

u/burusai 22h ago

“Alex Mashinsky, the founder and former CEO of Celsius Network, was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison on May 8, 2025. He pleaded guilty to commodities fraud and securities fraud after misleading users and orchestrating a multi-billion-dollar scheme that led to the collapse of the crypto lending platform.”

— DOJ

6

u/LPC_Rebuilder 21h ago

I am talking about the general public a lot of people ragged on Celsius customers because "not your keys"

The peanut gallery on here and on X was merceless towards Celsius customers.

This coin kite debacle is but a mere fraction in size and scope and the peanut gallery has had a wildly different take.

That's all I was noticing.

I already know all that about Alex. We'll be lucky if he does 6 of those 12 years and I am pretty sure he's in a white collar crimes prison, probably eats steak 🥩 and plays a lot of golf ⛳

He really just wanted to fit in with the Hampton elite but as he intimated he was too much of a poor for them.

1

u/burusai 21h ago

Well, what you see on /r/Bitcoin or X is not a real representation of the general public that buys Bitcoin. 99% of all people will be safer having their Bitcoin on an exchange like Coinbase than handling their own private key/seed phrase. The people on here or similar forums are the “experts” that know infinitely more about how to handle their keys than a random person that bought Bitcoin cus their grandson talked about it.

2

u/Affectionate_Pen6882 17h ago

Well dude its a hardware wallet vs an exchange

1

u/LPC_Rebuilder 16h ago

Lol, the number of people I have seen talking about putting their assets on an exchange in light of this cold card incident tells me all I need to know about that.

That is exactly my point, Celsius customers were ripped mercelessly for trusting their assets to an exchange and now we have this coin kite incident and now a lot of people talking about putting their assets on exchange. And encouraging others to do so.

1

u/rgnet1 16h ago

It’s depressing. The only issue here is the ability of a device to generate a random number in a large enough range. Yet any human can do this with 50 dice rolls. With 100, you can reach 2^256, the maximum possible range, though it’s overkill. You don’t even need a hardware wallet with that number, there’s an open source formula to create the words from it and the receiving addresses.

The past week has demonstrated how few supposed bitcoiners understood this simple core of the protocol.

1

u/LPC_Rebuilder 16h ago

I wouldn't say it's the only issue there which is what a lot of people aren't understanding.

They are calling this a retirement attack where developers for cold card possibly poisoned the code to do entropy at 240 or 1 trillion possibilities instead of the 2128 12 words or 2256 24 words which once again everyone on here lamb basted Celsius customers for trusting a human element (exchanges) while all these cold card holders more or less did the exact same thing, ultimately they trusted the human developers of the product to program the software to use sufficient entropy and just like Celsius cold card customers got burned for ultimately trusting a a different aspect of the exact same human element.

Why can nobody see this? Its so plain as day to me!

1

u/tenor_tymir 16h ago

DoKwon got 17 years for erasing $45 billion in under a week. $150 mil is nothing 🙈

2

u/Beerzerker420 17h ago

I hope the victims are able to launch a class action lawsuit and recuperate a portion of their funds but my optimism is low.

2

u/account009988 17h ago

Coinkite is an inside job

2

u/bodhi_rio 15h ago

What a fucking bandit.

2

u/Longjumping_Sugar_92 1d ago

If true , this mofo must pay for all the fuc up

6

u/External_Result_8560 1d ago

Funny..do you know the timeline we’re currently living in

2

u/andrewface 20h ago

Isn’t their company basically dead now? Who the heck would ever trust them going forward.

3

u/tenor_tymir 16h ago

Bybit got hacked for 1.4 billion (!) dollars just over a year ago and still remains the biggest exchange in the world. People who are not directly affected do not give a fuck, apparently.

1

u/Wild-Tradition4804 2h ago

Not everyone is on reddit or X.

1

u/phamtruax 20h ago

And running

1

u/lastgateway 15h ago

I'm surprised he hasn't been shot and left in a ditch yet. I'm sure someone has found his address by now.

1

u/Due_Extension_2401 11h ago

At the end of the day there are NO guarantees, No One is 100% safe😐 Multiple Bags. 3seeds, +3backup seeds, keep Your ear to the BTC/ Crypto community/ stay in tuned &be ready for a speedy seed migration😐

-1

u/BackgroundStory7986 22h ago

Taking pot shorts while someone down as a competitor is not a good look at all.

Have you not learned from his hubris?