BTC Sessions - What’s Hiding in Your Device? Adversarial Thinking with NVK – Mentor Sessions Ep.002

Episode Date: March 16, 2025

In this electrifying episode of Mentor Sessions, we dive deep with NVK, the enigmatic founder of Coinkite and mastermind behind the Coldcard wallet, including the sleek new Coldcard Q (yes, I’m a fan too!). NVK unpacks adversarial thinking—the paranoid art of outsmarting attackers before they strike. From designing bulletproof Bitcoin hardware to everyday OpSec blunders (porn and banking on the same browser, anyone?), NVK reveals why only the paranoid survive in a world of infinite threats. Plus, hilarious tangents, real-world horror stories, and a surprising twist on staying invisible. Are you ready to rethink security?Timestamps: • 00:00 – Intro: Meet NVK & Coinkite’s Coldcard Legacy • 00:57 – What is Adversarial Thinking? (Spoiler: It’s Not Just Paranoia) • 06:39 – Coldcard’s Battle-Tested Edge: $1M Attacks & Beyond • 19:45 – Epic Fails: How Smart People Lose Bitcoin • 31:10 – Inside Coldcard’s Silicon: Trust-Minimized Genius • 40:35 – Must-Have Hardware Wallet ChecklistConnect with NVK: • Twitter/X: @nvk • Nostr: primal.net/nvkExplore Coinkite: • Website: coinkite.com • Bitcoin Security Guide: bitcoinsecurity.org • Podcast: Bitcoin Review - https://bitcoin.review/FREE Bitcoin Book Giveaway:New to Bitcoin? Grab a free copy of Magic Internet Money by Jesse Berger! CLICK THE LINK:https://bitcoinmentororange.com/magic-internet-money Don’t have enough time to learn Bitcoin Self-Custody? Get Personalized, Expert guidance at Bitcoin Mentor. Check out https://bitcoinmentor.io/ Subscribe to Mentor Sessions:Don’t miss an episode—hit that subscribe button and follow us: • BTC Sessions: https://x.com/BTCsessions • Nathan: https://x.com/theBTCmentor• Gary: https://x.com/GaryLeeNYC BITCOIN WELL is the quickest and easiest way to get Bitcoin directly into self custody. They also offer non-KYC sells and bill payments. Transparent 1% spread, no additional fees and no withdrawal fees. Check them out today!https://qrco.de/bfiDC6COINKITE offers the BEST Bitcoin hardware on the market. Use this link to get 8% off anything in their store:https://qrco.de/bfiDBVMine Bitcoin like a pro! 🚀 BLOCKWARE offers rigs, hosting, and a Marketplace to buy miners instantly or sell anytime. No long-term commitment, total flexibility. Start mining today! 🌟 #Bitcoin #Mining https://qrco.de/bfiD4ZBOOK private one-on-one sessions with BITCOIN MENTOR! Learn self custody, hardware, multisig, lightning, privacy, running a node, and plenty more - all from a team of top notch educators that I've personally vetted.https://bitcoinmentor.io/#Privacy #Cybersecurity #BitcoinEducation #Bitcoin #Coldcard #CryptoSecurity #AdversarialThinking #OpSec

I mean, the amount of stuff that people have tried to do to it is like insane, right? Like, you know, from the ledger team spending probably close to a million dollars trying to break it. No way. Yeah, I mean, like they're lab. Today we're joined by Mrs. NVK, founder and CEO of Coin Kite, makers of the Bitcoin cold card. We talked to all things, adversarial thinking. What is adversarial thinking? How important is it when designing a Bitcoin hardware device? And how does such thinking play into other aspects of life? Our guest has a lot of great insights and as a bonus of pretty dark and sense of humor.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy this latest episode of Mentor Sessions. All right. Good morning, NVK. Thank you so much for joining us today. So I wanted to kick things off by just throwing to you the initial kind of question is, you know, you're clearly a very paranoid kind of crypto anarchist type, which I think is a good thing. But I think it's a good thing. So I want to throw on like the tinfoil hat here, the big one, and ask like, what is adversarial thinking? So essentially, like, you know, this comes from game theory, right?

Like, it's this idea of you try to think of like, you know, the worst case scenarios or like the worst things that could come at you, right? There is this famous quote. I forgot the book now, just drawing a blank, but only the paranoid will survive. And essentially, like, when you working on security, like, you have to deal with unknowns, unknowns, right? And how do you deal that? It's like these are unknowns unknowns. Like you don't know these unknowns, right? So what do you do?

Right? You try to put yourself in the shoes of somebody trying to attack you. Right. So, you know, you try to think, hey, you know, like, and everybody does this in their real life, like in normal life, right? It's like, well, I'm going to lock my house door in case somebody tries to open. Right? Right.

Like, you are engaging in a little bit. Right? Like, you are engaging in. adversarial thinking, right? You know, because, I mean, it could have been that your grandmother came to visit and now the door is locked, right? I mean, maybe you got that one wrong. But, you know, like, given the tradeoffs of your grandmother, maybe having to ring the

bell, so losing some convenience, right? You protected your guest self, maybe against somebody trying to steal an Amazon package from inside of your house or something, right? So like, it's just this idea of like trying to come up with like game plans and like first it's like what can people do? What can I do to defend myself? And what are the tradeoffs? Because it seems like there's always going to be tradeoffs in that sort of situation.

Sorry, Gary, I interrupted. No, I mean, this just sounds like common sense. Like what somebody might call adversarial thinking just sounds like not being a dumbass. Yeah, okay. Okay, so rule number one of adversarial thinking is don't be a dumbass. Don't be a dumbass. Don't be a dumbass. Okay. So if we take it then and we kind of think more about like in terms of like computer security,

because I think a lot of people have gotten really complacent in terms of their computer security. They've gotten really used to people doing that sort of stuff for them. Maybe even referring back to some stories from Coin Kite or what you guys are doing there, how are you guys thinking about computer security from an adversarial lens? So, you know, we we have like a lot of security researchers that, you know, try to do things against us. Like you have like penetration attackers kind of go in and test stuff? So we don't get into the details of a lot of stuff we do. Because that would be bad for adversarial thinking.

Yeah, but I mean, just between like the three of us. That's right. No, but let's just say like your normal security company, right? An average security company is going to have like, you know, people who they pay to try to try to try to try to review an audit like code and things. They're going to have like internal people that, you know, try to do some of that. They, you know, they have that kind of mindset, right? That's why they're in that industry. They themselves do some of that work.

And, you know, and then, you know, you do research and you try to figure out like, you know, the most amount, like essentially like, it's like the volume of stuff that could happen, right? Like what can happen? And then there is one thing that is the difference between people that have been in the market for a long time. And people who are new to the market is that like, you know, time in the market is the best way to. get battle tested, right? So we have like, first of a code card has been in the market for like many years now, right? So I mean, the amount of stuff that people have tried to do to it is like insane, right? Like, you know, from the ledger team spending probably close to a million dollars trying to break it. No way. Yeah. I mean, like their lab, you know, like, yeah, like, wow.

You know, to like, you know, other other companies trying to find flaws and, you know, it's, it's always like security is a moving target, right? So you have to always sort of like be taking this feedback in and hardening products till you reach, you know, like there is a balance, right? That balance is cost, right? And convenience. So, you know, can I make you advice that's maybe, you know, like 10 times more secure than what we have? Probably, but it's going to cost 100 times more. Sure. You know, so then it's like, is there a market for that? No.

Right. So it's like it's always the sort of balance, right, that we're playing with. And then there is what's also available and possible, right? Because nothing is unhackable, right? Like given infinite resources and infinite time and infinite samples, you can do anything, right? So for example, you know, the fun thing with Mark four is that, you know, nobody has demonstrated to us that they're able to see the extract. Okay.

Right? Even physically? Like that no one who's thrown in. Okay. Yeah. Nobody has, you know, is it possible? Absolutely. I'm pretty sure somebody out there, you know, eventually will figure out how to do it, right?

If the NSA is listening, they may have found a way. Yes. But here's the thing. How successfully can you do that given one sample? Yeah. Right? Because you're going to probably destroy the sample trying to do things, right? So there is a margin of error there kills the sample.

The other thing is like, you know, How much money do you have to do this, right? I mean, the NSA is infinite money, but your average other attackers, not, right? What's the ROI on that? Exactly, right? And can I go after other targets, right? So this is the main thing when it comes to security, not the main thing, but one aspect of it is like, you know, if you don't want to get eaten by the bear, you don't have to run faster than the bear. You just have to run faster than the other guy.

I was going to have longer legs than Gary and I'll be fine on our back. packing trip. Yeah, like, you know, when you think about like, you know, all these people who sort of like claim to have a lot of Bitcoin on the internet, they're very public about it, right? Like, so like, you know, these are target number one. You know, like, you know, if you whack, if you, if you like talk about like, you know, your holdings to every neighbor, I mean, you know, like you're putting yourself at risk, right? Because you don't know who's listening. So, the idea is like, you know, like you're quiet about, you know, you know, know, what you have, how you have it, how much you have it, right?

And I have none. Gary has none. Yeah. It's so weird because I totally have a cold card cue, full disclosure, and I love it. And yet there's no Bitcoin on it whatsoever. I don't even know why I own it. I think it was just fun for me. I mean, like, you know, I personally only hold a micro strategy.

Yeah. And I figure out how to put in the cold card. So good. So this is the idea, right? And these are things that everyday people can do it in their lives. Right. Like you can maybe get a little piece of paper and try to just draw out. Like, you know, like this is where my stuff is.

You know, this is how it's set up, you know. And then you try to sort of like little map it out to the little piece of paper. Like, you know, like what could happen to it? You know, it's like, you know, what if my house burned down? Right. Like what happens? What if, what if somebody breaks in into the house and take it? What happens?

You know, like you don't have to go full paranoid, right? For that you buy our device and then you go the rabbit hole. later. But like, you can go through the basics and try to figure out where is your risk, where is your catastrophic risk, and then burn that piece of paper, of course. Burn everything after reading. Of course. And to your point, I think people who try to do that are basically, you know, doing nice, you know, precautionary measures. But to the idea of adversarial thinking, I think even the smartest person, there's only so much that somebody can do just by trying to imagine and speculate. A lot of this has to come.

like I think you're saying through real world experience. That's why, you know, Ledger was spending a million dollars trying to hack it. Maybe there's something that they figured out that we didn't over at CoinCite and they're going to try to get through. I mean, that's just this life, isn't it? Yes. It really is, you know, pay attention and learn. You know, like try to try to understand what you're doing.

I think that's the first step. It really is. Like, that's why I created that little website, the BitcoinSecuret.org. That's why you guys exist. you know, that's why, you know, this community produces so much education, you know, like you have to learn how to drive before you drive. And there is no substitute for that. I mean, if you're not willing to learn how to drive, like take the bus.

So keep the money with somebody else, like, because you will lose it. I'm curious then, too, even on that note, if we, like, step away from Bitcoin for a second, is there anything maybe data related or just like general computing security related to that you think is kind of overlooked by people that they should be thinking about where attackers might be trying to come after them or how they might be making moves. Sorry, guys. A few minutes later. Don't worry.

Our editor can pull this out. No, no, no. I'm really sorry, getting like a bunch of messages. Our editor being Nathan right here. And I'm going to say to Nathan, no, I want the long pause, uncomfortable moment with the black screen so nobody can see what's going on. Leave it in. Leave it in there.

Field suspension. Sorry, what was the question? So what I'm wondering is, so we, especially from the Bitcoin perspective, we're already coming in assuming everybody's trying to steal our Bitcoin. At least most people are, at least they're a little bit aware of it because it's value. But I'm wondering if there's things that you've maybe seen in your experience for people to understand why this adversarial thinking is so important as it applies to other things, even just like computer security more broadly speaking.

Oh, absolutely. So, so like, you know, most people don't practice decent, like, upsec, like security hygiene, right? So they will use the same computer and browser that they use for porn to go to your online banking to, you know, like, wait a second, I got to write this down. Hang out. Very take notes. Exactly. You know, and they will, you know, they will use the same computer for other things, you know, like they will use the same phone number for, you know, like they, they will use the same phone number for, you know, a second-factor authentication for. a bunch of stuff, they use the same password and everything.

So like, there is a million things you can do. If you start just using a little, I know common sense is not common, but if you start using just your brain a little bit, start thinking through things, everybody has the instinct. Like everybody understands that if you use the same secret and everything in one thing leaks, now you're exposed, right? Thankfully, you know, computer manufacturers and, you know, like Apple, whatever, like they try to help the user a bit.

So, you know, like they made the password manager being integrated. part of the system. So it's a lot easier to do that. They help you hide your email. Right. Because if you use it, you know, like your full name, are you guys doxed? I don't know. Yeah, we're full day docs. Yeah, totally. It's bottom of the screen. Like, Gary.mood at gmail.com. You got me. For your coinbase, for your online banking, for whatever it is, right? Like now when that database leaks, somebody knows exactly who that is. Yeah. My password is super secure. It's seven all lowercase letters. So good luck.

Right. You know, so, so this is the thing, right? Like it's, it's just about using a little bit of a little bit of, it's a healthy paranoia, right? Like it's like, you know, when we talk about being paranoid in this space is not like, you know, a psychotic issue. It's more like, uh, it's about like hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst because these things do, like there is no backseys with Bitcoin, right? Like, you know, it's the same with having gold in your safe at home or a bunch of cash with you, right? Like, you have to be prepared to do that.

I guarantee you that somebody gave you like, you know, 200K cash in a bag and said, like, take it from this place to the other place. You're going to go sweating on the street. Yeah, you're going to be blatantly obvious the whole way, just trembling. You're going to stop and you're going to try to think, how can I do this in a way I don't get robbed? But you're going to create a little plan, right? It's the same idea. Like you, when you're doing self-custody, you have to think about like, if it's not the bank that holds the shotgun, then who does?

Right. Like how do I, how do I create a plan where I don't have catastrophic single points of failure? That's the key, right? Because shit will go wrong 100%. Like it's almost certainty that at least one thing will go wrong. Make that thing be redundant. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm going to protect your anonymity, KVN, so people don't know.

I don't want to give it away. How did you start going down this road? Have you always been somebody who kind of thought a worst case scenario? What could somebody do to get me with XYZ? Did it only come about with Bitcoin? Just some special moment? I think like Bitcoin really was the wake-up call. Like we started early in this industry.

You know, I do have people in my team that, you know, come from. like, you know, adjacent industries. And, and, you know, like, I think through experience and seeing what it was to be early in the space and seeing the proof of burns, like people accidentally send into the wrong address, not even a valid address, you know, like, so losing their BTC and, you know, paper wallets being lost and friends losing BTC we gave to people. Like, it's, you know, you learn, right? and then that shapes like the that shapes the thinking of the company i'm not alone in this right like

there is like we're a team that just does this and everybody sort of like comes in with like different different kinds of paranoid sort of like uh uh mindsets and and that's how we we create the system i'm curious because you guys have been here for so long too because i'm not mistaken you were in exchange first if i'm if i'm not wrong it was it was not an exchange it was the equivalent of like a crypto bank like we we were we were we were the custody of an ungodly amount of BTC at the time, not ours. And like, you know, everybody got... No, I mean, funny enough, it's like, yeah, it started that way.

And then we slowly, like, as multi-sig was invented in, integrated into Bitcoin P2SH, then we sort of started to roll over most of the customers into that, the ones that wanted. And then slowly sort of like defer that, that custody to them. And then we sort of got tired of being that industry because it was, very shit money at the time and also just a lot of headaches, as you can imagine. And we told everybody we're closing down, please take your money away in the next, whatever amount of time.

And we close down, people got their money back and nobody ever heard about it anymore. All right. You mentioned multisig. I don't know if you can offer any device. Let's say somebody, hypothetically, had a three physical wallet multisig set up that they wanted to do. Would you have any recommendations on like where? to store it, like at a friend's house, buried in the woods, like each one separately. Like how far are we going down this?

So this is a super hard question because people are different. People have different risk profiles. People have different tolerances for risk. People have different circumstances in life and people live in different places, right, with different risks too. So, you know, like if you're talking about like a guy in Miami, it's a very different risk than you're talking about a guy in San Paulo that is very different different than a guy in France. Sure. Right. Yeah. So, you know, like ideally all of them should have like each key in a

geographically different place, right, at least the backup. So, you know, each of them will have their metal plate, right? So like they'll go travel to a different country and go put in a different country, like literally a different country, ideally. Wow. All right. Yeah. You know, because, no, and I'm talking about this is for super cold stuff, right? Like, we're talking about. just like, you know, you're checking sort of like how you operate, right? Then, you know, then maybe it's a single sick passphrase or maybe it's multi-sig with collaborative multi-sig or maybe like there's a million ways for you to do this, right? But if we're talking about like multi-generational savings, right, you want to be in a position that like,

gun to the head does not move the needle. And you want to you still can't do it. Yeah. No, you can't. Like, you know, if it's going to take six months to recover the, the, the, the, with international trips. I mean, like, you know,

please follow me with the gun in my hip through the TFSA, right? That's how we're going to roll out. No, I mean, like, you know, it's like what, it's a very, you know, like dark case. Like, I mean, like,

are they going to hold somebody hostage for six months? Like, it's tricky, right? The government will? Yeah, yeah, fair enough. We've got that risk always playing out. You know,

and then there is the idea of like, the people not knowing what you have. Right? There is many ways to skin, this cat and like the problem with this conversation is like I'm very like I don't ever want to give specifics to people sure because people will go and follow that and then screw themselves right exactly well you told me to do that how come you know everybody has a very specific case scenario you know and and you know listen there is a reason why banks exist right it's because most people

don't want to hold the shotgun right so you you can create similar setups where like first if you walk to your bank agency and say I want to empty my my bank account, they're going to say why. Yep. It's not because they don't have the money. They don't care. They can just print it to give it to you. Yeah.

It's just a ledger entry. They'll be fine. That's right. It's because of security, right? Like they want to make sure you're not under distress to do that large withdrawal, right? Like, so there's like a lot of security checkpoints in place so that that doesn't happen, right? It's just that like with money, there is backcise. So with like, Fiat, there is backcisee.

Right. Like they can refer to transactions, but like they'll tell you, like if you're making a large wire, it's like to a different. they're going to say, hey, sorry, but are you sure you want to do this? You cannot reverse this, right? You're going to have to send, you know, like international cops into like whatever location is going to be. And it's essentially money lost, right? Unless you're using Tadder, which is like fully CBDC compliant and they can remote revoke anywhere on the planet.

But that's a different conversation. We issue the token and they can control it. Who would have thought? That's right. It's absolutely good. Actually, funny if I want to jump back for a second to kind of on. that no divorce case scenario because you've been here for so long is there any stories of someone making what seems like in hindsight a really stupid mistake and not planning for these things out

resulting in large loss or catastrophic failure yes so uh i mean like the the thing that i've seen the most through the years is people screen themselves out of their coins really yeah okay yeah mostly lost the hacks are like basis points versus people screen themselves at other coins so first one is rolling your own crypto. Thankfully, people don't do that anymore. Like, they'll come up with their own algorithm to sort of like store or create their private keys. All kinds of, like, insane.

Especially smart people. Smart people are their worst enemies. It's a hard life, Gary. It really is. The smarter you are, like, the bigger your blind spot is, right? Like, so because you're confident about what you're doing, right? So, you know, like, so I saw a lot of sad stories with programmers dead and alive.

So like, for example, a lot of crying sort of like with those, with like the guy laughed them, a complicated, convoluted, sort of like, you know, treasure hunt or, you know, like, you know, some complex encryption system that like, you know, nobody can get in. Yeah. Encryption is great when you have the keys, right? Sure.

Yeah. So, like, I see a lot of that. A lot of people lost money because paper wallets burned. and get wet. So use metal. A lot of people lost money because, you know, like the, they wanted to use Air Gap Computers. And, you know, there's this great little website, AirGapcomputer.com.

I think. Can't remember if it's plural or not. Shows a bunch of like attacks against computers. Computers are not designed to hold secrets. Oh, I've seen that. It's like two across the way, like they're just able to pass information or force it somehow across the computer. Yeah.

It's like endless because computers were not designed to hold secrets. They're designed for a check email. You know, and again, and people go to their porno tube or whatever and then just see this with trust wallet, right? Yeah. I mean, people not anybody here, but other people do that. Especially not Gary. So, so yeah, I mean, it's tricky. Like people, people do things, especially when they're smart, trying to sort of, you know, it's like, it's like,

You go down the rabbit hole and you create some sort of confidence, but the problem is you don't have economies of scale in your custom solution. Right. Like, you know, a lot of people have cold cards. A lot of people try to break cold cards, right? A lot of people try to break the flow of that device. A lot of people try to break the flow of seeds. Right.

So like you create a lot of knowledge just based on that economies of scale, right, of being attacked. So the practices would. already be bashed even if it was not because we're smart. It's just because like, you know, like you learn and you fix and you change things based on real world feedback. And boy, we hear stories. And like, so, so like if you just use commercially available devices, you are using free market dynamics for your protection. Right. That's the, the beauty of it.

You know, tapping into everybody else's specialization so you don't have to be a computer security expert, but you can take advantage of it. Or just the experience of it. Like, maybe you are. Like, I've seen this. Like, you are like, you know, super top security researcher and you still lose your Bitcoin. Or core devs. It has happened before.

Like, core dives lost coin. I remember seeing a post from Luke Dasher at some point. Yeah. Yeah. He lost 200 BTC, you know, because, you know, apparently the, it was either the random number generator on that specific computer, no joke that was compromised, really had a flaw, or, you know, the server where he had his PGP key backup or something like that got compromised, like, or both. Like, it's hard to really walk back, but the point is,

you know, the coins are lost because you just didn't use the wallet. You know, and I see this all the time. I see the folks with the Raspberry Pi is doing the same thing. Like, they want, you know, like you feel like a super, a superhero, right? Like, because you put together, you know, like some wires on something. And now, like, you know, like you feel the confidence of it. It's pretty, you know, it works great. And you know what, but it was not designed for that, right? It's going to have a lot of holes.

Yeah, just double tapping on that for a second as well, too. What is the issue with using something like a Raspberry Pi and the general purpose computing, even if you do it all yourself in air-gapped? Well, it's the same reason why you don't use a laptop, like a Raspberry pie is just a laptop. All right guys, if you're new to Bitcoin, we've got something special for you. We're giving away copies of magic internet money by Jesse Berger, a must-read comprehensive introduction to Bitcoin.

It's our gift to help kickstart your learning journey. Just scan the QR code or click the link in the description down below to grab your copy now. That's it. You know, like it's a general purpose computer not designed for hold secrets, right? And you know, you can transmit radio from that. You can, you know, the firmware is not checked at boot. So there is no secure boot on it.

So, you know, every time you boot it, you have to get fresh firmware to put in it. If you're booting from the same SD cards, somebody could have put a compromise the ST card in there. That stores the seed or send it out via radio. Like the rabbit hole is so crazy and it's so simple to do a lot of these attacks, right? They're like, fortunately, you don't see a lot of, first of all, most people that get hacked don't talk about in public because it's very, very, very. embarrassing. I imagine it's also like putting out a signal that like you're a vulnerable target. Exactly.

Yeah. People want to hit again. Yeah. Most people probably not know they got robbed until many years later. Oh, God. There is that problem. Let me just go check my balance and oh shit. Exactly, right? You know, it's it's just, it's a device that's very cool for education.

I think everybody should go and build it on the hard wall. Let's have fun, learn. And right, but when it comes to the real deal, like, you know, it's like either diversify or do your research and be confidence about a specific vendor. But like, you know, to take it seriously, man, like, you know, like if you don't know what you're doing and you just, you just got here, like don't, don't, you know, don't, um, you know, don't follow advice from a random Twitter is always the best sort of like. I've heard that people on the internet can lie. Right. No, it's just people want to be important. You know, it's on the internet.

Right? It must be, must be true. It must be true. I even just think about this too, it seems like the other thing that you kind of get the advantage of going with the commercial supply is that you also have the competition between the hardware companies. Yes.

Like I bet that's another element that puts pressure on you guys as well as them to keep up and to continue iterating and get better as well too. and to maybe catch things that other people maybe have missed, right? I mean, there is a reason why for-profit things are often, you know, better than the average sort of like DIY thing, right? It's, again, specialization of labor and economies of scale, right? Like, you know, like, can you build an amazing race car in your garage?

Yes. Right? One person can. Maybe two, right? Like, you know, if you could afford, you know, like, Quinezaga or some insane car like that. I mean, you know, chances are it's going to be better. Now, is the air conditioning and the safety better on a Lamborghini or a, you know, like a Corolla? I bet the corolla is better. Yeah, I would agree. Yeah. Right? Like, it's going to last longer.

It's going to. It's going to last forever. I need one of those $10,000 trucks. Right? No, because like, you know, the amount of economies scale you get on a corolla are like insane. Yeah, plus the Japanese, right? Yeah. Well, there's that too. Although the corollas are now made in Mexico too, so. Ah, okay, well.

So much for that. It's a five sigma, not a six sigma kind of like QA, but still. No, you know, anyways, like I, you know, if people just stopped and took a minute to just sort of reflect like you don't fly, your family,

in a DIY plane. Yeah. There's people who do it, but it's just, you know, it's one dude out there kind of thing, right? Like, can you do it? Absolutely. Should you try to do it, you know, now you start sort of, you know, like, it's the same way of like, you know, would you, would you drive your family in a, you know, a car without only how to drive, right? Like it's, you know, your, your BTC is kind of important, right?

So like, you have to, you have to assess risk and confidence. can be very detrimental. Would you apply adversarial thinking to, I mean, I assume you would, to talking to somebody about kind of trying to orange pill them, trying to get them into Bitcoin. Literally last night, I had an old friend of mine come over for the Super Bowl party. And I've talked about Bitcoin before. And he said, well, you know, I have an IRA and I have some stocks that I bought. And to me, I know we've talked about it.

It just seems like the numbers is going up and it's not backed by anything. And would you present this in a way to him say, well, think about the worst case. scenario for your Fiat investments versus the worst case scenario for your Bitcoin investments, which is going to leave your best off. And if so, how might you present that? Oh, man, I've been in the grind of trying to orange people for so many years now. I just don't. Yeah, I know. No, really, like, I just don't because I find that people just get sour, like, because they go two, three many cycles later. They're like, because you tell them every, like, every cycle, every year or whatever.

You know, every family event, you know, and then people start getting very mad at you. Yeah, nothing pisses off friends more than success. But, you know, I, you know, I do talk to people about the difference between, like, you know, what an ETF is and having the actual asset, right? Like, you know, and, you know, it's the difference between having gold and having, you know, some gold stocks, right? Like, but again, it's, I think we're past the point where, like, screaming at people for them. to get Bitcoin. It's like worth it now. It's like there's enough education out there. If they're not ready, they're not ready. And, you know, like there's always a have fun staying poor, right? It ultimately, like, you've got to be humble, right? And that's exactly it.

You're just waiting for people to be humble and ready and open to come and check it out. Kind of pivoting, changing subjects just a little bit. I'm curious and, you know, expose everything. Tell me all the secrets. But from what you can maybe share about what's going on with the Cold Carlsville, too, there was an article. And I'm trying to remember who wrote it because I think I actually heard the audible version from Mr. Guy Swan there, going through the actual structure of the device and how you've got adversarial thinking basically right in the silicon as well, too. Could you share some of those examples or walk through how the cold card is actually protecting us in the way that it's built? So we wrote a blog post to be a little bit more digestible about the

stuff. It's a deep dive, I think, into like the cold card security thing. I highly recommend people go read. That one is very digestible. It's based on two dollars. documents that are the design documents of CodeCard. And the thing is, we don't, we don't trust the vendors, right? We don't trust the secure elements. We don't trust the vendors, not because they're mean, just because you shouldn't trust them, right? But then that puts you in a conundrum. It's like, what do you do?

Like, are you going to like make your own silicon great? But then now you're trusting your fab. You're trusting yourself. You just, so like, so then we, we went on to think like, okay, what can we do? to trust minimize, because nothing is trustless, but like you trust minimize the vendors in a way that is cryptographically provable, right? So what we did is we have essentially three secrets.

There is secure element number one, secure element number two, and then there is a software secure enclave on the main chip, right? And then what we do is the seed is encrypted with open source code, right, or source viewable, whatever people want to call it. It's encrypted with like a part, like the main secret for encryption uses the three secrets, uses a secret from the three chips from each of them. We compose that as a single big secret, right?

And then we use that to encrypt your C dead rest. The beauty of that is even if two of the vendors, like, you know, two of the chips get compromised and they know somehow what their secret generation is, you still can't decrypt. You have to get these three secrets. And, you know, to get these three secrets from these separate chips, trying to laser, like, nobody has demonstrated that they can do it. You know, theoretically, I'm sure there is 50 people on the internet that can write a paper on how they would do it. This is how I would do it.

And I promise you would work as soon as I actually get in the lab. Exactly. It has not been demonstrated. So, you know, like that really, really increases the level of security. Now, we do the same in three different ways for C generation as well. Okay. You can use the code card C generation. We use secrets from three different sources. We then put them...

Can we make a note? Yeah. Sorry. It's all public. It's all public. That's the beauty. Yeah, beautiful. We, we then, but then we put it through a shot function, right?

So then, like, you cannot reverse engineer that, right? Like that secret. And even if that secret had, like, a lot of, a lot of, like, evilness on it, it doesn't decrease the quality of that secret, even if two of those were bad. You know, it gets complicated on the math. But it's almost that that's the practical, not the. theoretical sort of like thing about it, right? And that's comparing to every other hydro wallet that doesn't even do like one thousandth of this, right?

Yeah. So anyway, so we do that and that's how we generate your seat. However, let's say you don't want to trust us. So what we'll like to do is you can mix that secret with some dice rolls. So we mix the two of them. So essentially you adding, you know, more noise or more things. like essentially more entropy to that secret. That's what the kids call it, entropy.

Exactly. Now, if you want to go the third way, that's the true-solver way, is you throw the dice, and you're responsible for generating that secret. So now you have to really throw 99 dice, not type 0 99 times. You know, you have to actually do it.

And then you're going to have your... The cool thing about this third one is that you can reproduce it. If you write those down, you can take another hardware vendor and you can input that one that supports, the same dice generation schema that we have, you can input into the auto and you can prove that we're doing what we claim to be doing. Yeah. You get the same result each time. And it's 99. I thought it was 100 for some reason, which by the way, selling the giant bag is wonderful.

Thank you for doing that. Yeah, that's right. If that's what you did, which you definitely didn't. 100%, because I would never experiment or try with these things as well, too. It's funny. One of the, one of my favorite things about working with the cold card just from the educational standpoint as well too, is both the firmware light at the beginning that has been verified and the anti-fishing words. Because every time I get started with somebody, too, and I wonder if you just even go into what exactly is going on there, but it's a wonderful conversation piece of indicating exactly like the next level kind of thinking of attack that people need to be aware of when dealing with Bitcoin. Because even just explaining the purpose of the anti-fishing words, a lot of times

they haven't even considered that threat vector. All right, guys. Now, a quick brief message from this episode's sponsors. Bitcoin Well is the best place to be buying and selling Bitcoin in Canada and the U.S. And now with Bitcoin Well Infinite, it's also the best place to be making large buys at their OTC desk of over $50,000. Their white glove service gives you fast transactions, no slippage, and the lowest fees. You can scan the QR code on the screen or simply head to Bitcoinwell.com slash BTC sessions to sign up today.

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on the screen to get started today. Right. Yeah, no, I mean, like, when you get into those levels of threat, it really is sort of like, you know, we're now talking about, you know, like you're looking for a level of confidence in your setup that is for, you know, multi-decade setups, right? Like, you know, and also you never know what flaw somebody's going to find tomorrow, right? Because somebody finds a flaw tomorrow, the good thing is you're probably defended against that because you don't have, it's all about like you're trying to not have a single point of failure.

It's like stacking up redundancies. Exactly. So we call the defense in depth. It means you have multiple layers of defense. Each of them costs time and money for an attacker. or a bug. You know, because like, realistically speaking, like it could just be a bug. Say for example, you know, you buy a hard wallet

that only works over USB, right? And there is a bug. Okay, like not for fault of anybody, there is a bug. And, you know, somebody's watching that USB with a little virus on the computer and they managed to take the Bitcoin out of the hard wall. And money gone, right? So now if the device is not connected,

even if you have that bug, they were not able to take that. Exactly, right? So you want to stack these things. For example, we do a lot of supply chain attacks, attack resistance, right? So we have the multiple chips, so we don't, not a single attack vector with the chips, right? And then what we do is we have secure boot, right? So the device has its own integrity check of the firmware. But then you can reproduce the firmware and check yourself as well.

So we are not an attack vector, right? I don't want to get kidnapped. Yeah. Yeah, right? Yes. There's been a little bit of that going on, Lee. They can imagine that's at least somewhat of a concern. Right. So then what we do is we put the devices on a security bag, kind of like an airport booze bag. And then we, but before we do it, we scan the serial number of the bag. And we put it in the secure element of device. So then the bag checks, right? You know, each of these things could be, you know, like say your bag arrives open, right? Because custom sometimes open. It's not other than the world. Right. Like that would be, there will be a problem if there is other aspects that are not great. Like, for example, why is there an extra device inside my device? That's why we have a clear case.

This is a letter that's been initialized. What's going on here? So that you can access, you can assess what's like if the device is good. So anyways, that's how we function. And we try to think of like, you know, what else can we do? Well, even like the fact that it's transparent and it says shoot here is one of my favorite things to show people when we get started as well to. Or the NFC and the USB you can disable under the batteries, the queue. Yes. Yeah.

So, like, exactly, right? So, for example, if you're using the queue for like, you know, multi-generational, like, you know, seed, like storage or generation, right? Like, you know, maybe you want to scratch off the NFC and the USB, you know, like it doesn't hurt. You know, like it's like one last thing for you to be concerned about, right? Like, and, and, you know, when people talk about like, you know, like wasting hardware and all this shit, like, I mean, come on, man. It's like, you know, it's like 200 bucks. Yeah, compared to your stack in 10 years. Exactly.

Right. Like, if your 10x was worth like 10, 100x what it is now, do you really care the device was 200 bucks? Like, buy five of them, buy 10 of them and try. different shit, right? Like, it's like egregious to me when people care. And if, in all honestly, like, if you don't have enough money to afford a harder wallet, you probably don't have enough Bitcoin that is worth storing a hard wallet. Maybe you just put that into, you know, like a good software wallet, like a good phone wallet for now, or maybe use multi-sig between two phones or something, right? And then, you know, like buy more BTC instead of buying a harder

wallet. For anyone that's out there thinking of getting a new device, what requirements should they look for for selecting a hardware wallet? So this is this is my list that I put on then BitcoinSecuretor.org. It's like the non-negotiable list, okay, for a harder wallet. Okay. So first one is a screen because you have to be able to check the transaction on the device screen because computers have viruses and the software wallet on the computer could and will likely be lying to you. Right. Very important. The second one, it has to be a gap. So that means there's no USB, there's no Bluetooth, there is no internet connection,

there's none of those things. Why? Because first is if there is a bug in one of those connections, the computer can probably take it. Second is, it's a lot harder to attack a device that you don't have synchronous connection to. Because what happens? When you're pen testing something, you want feedback. Like you try your little exploit, it doesn't work. You try your other exploit, it doesn't work, right? If you're doing that air gap, you don't know until the devices may be connected via some other thing later or you're using some other sort of means of getting the data in and out. It's a lot harder. So synchronous connections are terrible. That means USB, Bluetooth or an internet cable. Okay. Now, secure elements. The harder

wall, it must have a secure element. Okay. So for example, your Raspberry Pi does not qualify for that. Okay, it cannot keep secrets. It cannot, because see, you need a secure boot to do what? Not just keep secrets. Because you can keep the secret encrypted at rest in, you know, in non-secure enclave. That's fine, right? Because it's encrypted. Now, what you need a secure element for the most part is to check the boot sequence

so that it verifies the firmware running at that moment is good and it's not going to steal your seat or do something else. or create bad private keys or something, right? The security chain of everything is very important. And then the next thing is be open source software, right, or source viewable, however you want to call it. Okay. It's important that you are able to verify or a friend or third party verify the source code and be reproducible.

Okay? So you have to be, because just being open doesn't mean anything. So there is a lot of projects out there. They're like, oh, look, our project is on GitHub. Right? But then, first, if it's an app on iOS, you cannot check. You can't verify it. Exactly, right?

Yeah, you know what's actually loaded onto your phone. Exactly, right? So you cannot trust it. And on a computer, you cannot trust software runtime because there's a million processes happening. But for harder wallets themselves, the source has to be viewable and reproducible. Okay, if you cannot do that, trash it. Like literally.

In the bin, light of fire, all done. Yeah, and then real secure boot. That's what I was talking about, to prevent and authorize from our changes, right? So Raspberry Pi, no good. Many harder wallets, not good. I'm not going to... Go ahead.

Then one more thing is no remote validation. Okay, why? You don't want a harder wallet that needs, or wants or requires that you check its validity when you remove. So the term you use is the fake Rolex issue, right? So you receive a device, right, that looks just right. And then what the vendor tells you to do is like, please take this device and type in the serial number or something

or validate with some cryptography or something. The problem with that is, first of all, there's a privacy issue depending on how they do it. So you could leak out who you are to the vendor. Second is this vendor could create a firmware that's just evil to you. We've seen this secure agencies do this all the time, especially dictators, do this all the time. Okay? So you don't want that.

Or a PIN server. You don't want a device that depends, the security depends on the server because the server might not be there. And now you have to travel to another country to go find your seed. And then every time you touch your seed, you are at risk. Hmm. So I don't want you to name names if you don't want to, but other than Coin Kite, how many current hard wallets satisfy all those criteria? I'm just going to leave it that like I recommend cold card at this time.

Like it's pretty pretty, it really is pretty, like, it's actually like, it's one of those things that pisses me off because like, you know, there's a lot of people that want to do multi-vender multi-sig, right? Or, you know, I want to be able to recommend one or two, competitors, right? Because I think it's important to have alternatives out there. And, and, you know, some of them were better and are no longer that great. So, for example, the guys from Ledger, right? They, they are a very professional, like, very hardened, like, device. Okay. Like, no doubt, very hardened. These guys know what they're doing. However,

you know, it's close source. And, you know, now they have that. sort of like upload your seat as default. And then there's a bunch of things that went downhill from there, right? So like I have a lot of respect for their security team, but I no longer recommend the device unless it's a like a multi-sig, multi-vender kind of thing. You know, like it. And then like they are probably the only people that I would like say it's a

little safer on the USB side because they, they are playing at a different level. You know, the other devices all require USB. or, you know, like, or they have like a bunch of issues on architecture, or they're using, you know, ESP 32 stacks from China. It's just like once you start diving in, it's brutal, man. You see problems everywhere. That tin-fold hack, it's tighter. Yeah, it really is brutal.

No, it's very interesting. Quickly, I want to ask another question too, but I want to find a way to interject this story, so I'm going to throw it in anyway. So the importance of, you know, don't trust verify, Gary, you might get a kick out of this, having a dot of yourself. I got in trouble the other day, right? Because I was rushing to get everybody ready in the morning. And so, mom wasn't feeling great. And so I'm taking care of it.

And it's like, okay, get the kid's dress, get them food. And then I got to do my daughter's hair. And I can't find her detangler, but I see a little bottle of like a different stuff kind of hanging out on the side there. Yeah, right? And it says, like, new wave on it. Like, it must be like anti-curl stuff too. And so I grabbed this stuff and start spritzing her hair and combing everything out and

trying to do it all really nice. and my wife basically comes in and freaks at me and goes like, what the fuck are you doing? That was chemical deodorizer for the carpet that I had moved into the wrong spot. So even though it's a new way, it looked like a brand new little bottle for a hair detainler, it was the wrong thing. So just a remind everybody out there, it's not just Bitcoin. Don't trust. Verify the shit that you're putting in your kid's hair. We had to go for a shower before going anywhere that day.

Oh, poor thing. Which is my way of pivoting into. I have a specific question. That's actually more for me, and hopefully the audience will find it interesting as well, too. when it comes to the new firmware updates, do you have kind of a base position on whether or not that's something that you should be regularly pursuing

or it will ultimately be fine? I have very strong opinions on this. Awesome. Let's hear your very strong, passionate opinions. So first of all, never rush into anything when it comes to a cryptography or your hodo, ever. The first move is not to run for your pile. Okay.

The first move is breathe and go read a little more. Okay. Because see, every time you go towards your backup, you are at risk. Okay, you're at risk of leaking your backup when you take. That's why you never make backups in seed QR or something like that. Those are great transfer from Mualo to another, but they're terrible because any camera in your environment can read those seeds. Can pick it up, yeah. It's terrible.

Every fucking TV from China now has a camera, right? We've fridge has a camera these days. It's getting really weird. It's brutal. So anyway, so the first thing is don't freak out. Just chill. Okay. If the vendor does not say it is a critical security update, do not update unless you have

the device in hand and you really want to try the new feature. Like, if you don't have a reason to update, if the vendor is not saying this is an important update, don't update. Just chill. You can do it. And just had a curiosity from the Quankite side, how would we know if it was a critical one? We will say, please, update. This is a very important update.

So these browse by the page on occasion. Yeah, I know. But like oftentimes, like if the vendor says security update, it's probably a good idea to update. Maybe wait for a few people to update first. Maybe people back on the internet. You know, this brick my device or whatever, right? Like, for us, it doesn't happen.

Like, that doesn't, like, we really check against that kind of stuff. But, you know, it's always good to wait a little unless it's like, you know, catastrophic failure and the vendor says, you know, like, dude, fucking run for your life and more fucking update now. But even then, maybe don't because it could be fake, right? So yeah, right? Just best thing is just chill. Okay.

All right. Beautiful. I like that, Gary. I got one last question for you. We're talking about adversarial thinking and clearly through this whole thing, you've not wanted to show your face. Now, this seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon. What is your thinking behind this?

because I'm thinking everybody knows what you look like. At this point, kind of the cat's out of the bag. So what is it that you're hoping? And if you don't want to share, you don't have to share. But what is it. No, no, no, no. I totally do. So what I've learned through time is that like there is always somebody out there trying to be famous.

Okay. Like lots of people want to be famous in every possible space, right? Which is great. Gary's an act. Yeah, Gary the actor, not even. No interest. That's a firewall. Right.

Why? Because, see, like, advanced attackers, there is, you really legitimately. practically cannot hide. Okay, they'll hire proper professionals. They'll find anybody. Okay, like those days of being able to disappear unless you're Macafee, you know, on a rip-tie, like Papisco or something like that. Wherever he is, I hope he's happy.

Exactly, me too. Third wife or something, right? He's the hero we don't deserve. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But the thing is, like, you know, just having a little bit of a separation between who you are now physically speaking and the current state,

like whatever latest thing that there is out there is like a huge improvement in your Opsack, right? Because, you know, like, ideally, like, especially if you work in this industry, if you work in this industry is a little different, right? Because I still have to, like, I still want to participate in the discourse. I still want to participate into like, you know, all the things, Bitcoin, right? But, you know, like, I don't want my, like, current neighbors to accidentally bump into, like, you know, my face talking about this stuff. Or, like, I don't, I think, I think just, just decreasing your visibility and making that into a principle where you just started to, like, not having your face on everything, like, helps a lot.

Because, again, you know, it's like, there's plenty of people out there that want their face to show up. So, I think that's, that's very helpful. Speaking of, if I can make you a mask of my face, could you wear that? Can you get one of those AI videos to just AIU into my screen? That would be fucking awesome. I get one of those just like Hollywood quality masks, right? Just Mission Impossible to shit. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

It's just like, you know, like it's like your current haircut doesn't, like people don't know what that is. Like, and people are preoccupied their own lives and, you know, it's just, it's better hygiene. I fully expected, like, if I ever happened to run into a event or something, too, just to be completely like the skies. Oh, that's a good one you could do. Maybe you're a really jacked woman, too, right? With blonde hair and you do the car, the car, uh, the Clark Kent glasses. I am going to start asking people to put the she pronoun on the, on the, on the, on the legends of, uh, of every podcast. I'm going to make a note of that right now.

I'll make sure to include that we had Mrs. MVP here. Sorry, Mrs. KVN. Oh, please, please do. I really, like, that would be hilarious. Oh, I'm not joking. I'm going to do it. Perfect. I'm going to, I'm going to tuck in before every future of Bitcoin transaction.

But, like, what's the, what's the title for married woman? I'm a married woman. Mrs. Mrs. There you go. There you go. Mrs. NVK. Love it.

Perfect. Absolutely love it. That's the best way to hide. And I guess you change your passport these days, too, right? I mean, assuming you still contain a Canadian one, if I'm not revealing too much. I mean, if you're Canadian, it can just be an ex-gender. Yeah. The other country of there.

All right. Cool. Absolutely beautiful. Well, Mrs. NVK, we really appreciate your time here. Before we kind of wrap up and let you go, where can people find you that you want to be found? What should people go and check out? You can find me on NVK on Twitter.

You can find me on Primo slash NVK. you can find me on coincite.com is where our products are. You can keep track of Bitcoin. Security.org. I highly recommend it because I do update that often as I remember that people screw themselves with two-factor authentication or whatever. So I put a little advice there. And the Bitcoin.com.

Beautiful. That is awesome. Thank you so much, sir. It's been fantastic conversation. and we'll talk soon. You mean, ma'am. Ma'am. Thank you, ma'am.

Thank you. Dude, you're offended me. I appreciate it. Thank you very much, sincerely. It was a great chatting with you. Thank you, guys.