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Stacie Waleyko
Self Custody Is Not Dead with Stacie Waleyko
- Cold Card hardware wallet vulnerability affecting devices with firmware post-2021: a software bug caused the device to fall back from a secure randomness source (Trezor cryptographic library) to a weaker LibNG library, reducing entropy from 256 bits to a brute-forceable key space. - Attackers likely used open-weight AI models (e.g., Kimi K3) to grind through the reduced key space and sweep affected wallets; attacks are ongoing. - Cold Card's licensing change from GPL to CC removed access to the battle-tested Trezor library, forcing reliance on a replacement library of unclear provenance. - Open-source security is a double-edged sword: code transparency enables community review and AI-assisted auditing, but also allows attackers to find vulnerabilities. - Multi-vendor multisig is recommended as the near-term practical solution; covenants and vaults are longer-term improvements that could add time-locks and spending rules to prevent instant sweeps. - Self-custody remains viable and worth defending, though non-technical users should seek assistance from established providers (Casa, Unchained, BitKey) offering emergency key backup.
How Stacie Waleyko is Transforming Bitcoin Education
- Stacey Waleyko has created "Satsy's Pocket Guides," open-source educational zines (short booklets) on single sheets of paper covering Bitcoin technology topics like BIPs, Taproot, and Payjoin; they are printable and available at satsi.dev/zines. - Payjoin is a transaction batching method that breaks common chain analysis heuristics by having the receiver contribute an input, enabling transaction cut-through and more efficient block space usage. - Saving Satoshi is an in-browser educational game with a Bitcoin-themed sci-fi narrative designed to teach newcomers Bitcoin technology through interactive lessons spanning mining, elliptic curve cryptography, script, and Lightning Network. - Stratum V2 is a mining protocol upgrade from Stratum V1 that introduces job declaration (miners choose transactions), authentication, encryption, and performance improvements via binary messaging instead of JSON RPC. - Bitcoin faces both malicious attacks (from bad actors, governments, media) and innocuous attacks (talented developers choosing alternative coins), both requiring different educational and strategic responses. - The game development team includes Stacey, Jonas from Chaincode Labs, Christoph from Bitcoin Design Community, and contributors including Matthew Zipkin and writers Ken and John Tinklenberg; the project neared completion of its planned 10 chapters after two years of work.