English1550 🇬🇧⚒️

English, modernist, into technology, a future thinker, libertarian, and human! #Bitcoin

[Cyber Scrilla @CyberScrilla]

🚨 WARNING: I found a fake Ledger website/app at the top of Google Search that is designed to steal seed phrases.

Google shows 1M+ visits in the past 30 days

No confirmed link to the alleged $86M theft, but be careful and never enter your seed phrase online.

[Satoshi Society @SatsSociety]

⚡️Our next Bitcoin meetup - Southampton⚡️
📅Friday 30th October
🕰️7pm
📍Maritimo Lounge, Ocean Village, Soton SO143LG

Another month of Bitcoin proving the point while fiat keeps proving the problem

@BitcoinEventsUK
@BtcBeachBmouth
@btc_portsmouth
@Bitcoinshire
@purbeckbitcoin

[Satoshi Society @SatsSociety]

⚡️Our next Bitcoin meetup in Southampton⚡️THIS WEEK!

📅Friday 25th September
⏲️7pm
📍Maritimo Lounge, Ocean Village, Soton SO143LG

Come join us!

@BitcoinEventsUK
@BtcBeachBmouth
@btc_portsmouth
@Bitcoinshire
@purbeckbitcoin

[Binance @binance]

Bitcoin supply: nearly fully booked.

[Satoshi Society @SatsSociety]

⚡️Our next Bitcoin meetup in Southampton⚡️
📅Friday 21st August
⏲️7pm
📍Maritimo Lounge, Ocean Village, Soton SO143LG

It’s been a hectic few weeks in Bitcoin....let’s discuss!

@BitcoinEventsUK
@BtcBeachBmouth
@btc_portsmouth
@Bitcoinshire
@purbeckbitcoin

[Charles Guillemet @P3b7_]

Randomness Is the Foundation

Cryptography is hard. Implementing it securely is harder. And the part almost nobody thinks about, generating high quality randomness, is where the whole thing lives or dies.

This week's Coldcard incident made that visible in the most expensive way possible.

What broke. Every private key you own derives from one number: the seed. If that number is predictable, everything derived from it is too. Coldcard's firmware was supposed to draw that seed from a dedicated hardware RNG. It didn't. A guard checked whether a config macro was defined, not whether it was enabled, so the build silently fell back to a software generator seeded from the chip's serial number and timer, values an attacker can reconstruct. Older devices were effectively deterministic; current ones were capped near 32 bits, about four billion possibilities. A seed space advertised as 128 bits collapsed to something you can enumerate. Researchers estimate more than 1,000 BTC drained from roughly 1,200 wallets, from a flaw sitting in public code since March 2021. The device never had to be touched.

A bad RNG is silent. The output still looks random and passes casual inspection. You discover the problem when someone else does, on-chain, at 21:56 on a Thursday. That is why randomness cannot be a software convenience with a fallback path. It has to be engineered, measured, and certified as a first-class security function.

How we do it at Ledger. We build on certified Secure Elements specifically to access the best cryptographic primitives, including a True hardware RNG. The TRNG is physics, not a formula: it leverages chaotic physical phenomena on silicon to produce genuine entropy, so there is no seed to guess. The Secure Element embeds hardware detectors that watch for malfunctions and manipulation, environmental sensors, active shielding, glitch and voltage detection. Extreme temperature, for instance, can degrade a noise source, so the hardware is built to catch that rather than quietly ship weak entropy. And raw entropy is never used directly: this low-throughput source is fed into cryptographic post-processing inside Ledger OS. Physics for the entropy, cryptography to condition it.

The certifications, and what they mean. Claims are cheap. Certifications are third parties trying to break your claims. Our TRNG is evaluated under AIS-31 and certified PTG.2. AIS-31 is the German BSI methodology, used inside the Common Criteria scheme, that defines how to evaluate a true physical RNG, including a stochastic model of the noise source, not just tests on the output. The Secure Element carries Common Criteria certification at EAL5+ / EAL6+. And Ledger devices are certified under CSPN, ANSSI's first-level scheme, with random number generation quality explicitly in scope. The exact failure that hit Coldcard, "generating a biased or deterministic random number," is written down as Threat #1 in our published security targets, and the TRNG is the security function that answers it.

On closed source, honestly. This part of Ledger OS is closed source. Access to this Secure Element technology comes with a hard vendor requirement that the low-level implementation stays closed. We love open source, but between the highest level of certified security and open source philosophy for this specific layer, we chose security, and I still think that was the right call.
Closed source does not mean unaudited: our code goes through regular evaluation by multiple independent vendors and earns certification on a recurring basis. Security shall not rely on obscurity, that principle stands.

But it is also true that closed source raises the cost of vulnerability research for an attacker. Both are true at once. A flaw sitting in public code for five years until an adversary reportedly used AI to find it is a reminder that "open" and "reviewed" are not the same word.

That AI angle is not a footnote. Internally we make heavy use of LLMs to hunt for vulnerabilities in our own products, and it is genuinely effective (Read the excellent blogpost on the matter: https://t.co/DQAzVZefBu). The adversary is already doing this at machine speed. So do we, before they do. More on our approach soon.

None of this makes us immune. It makes us measurable, monitored, and certified against exactly the class of failure that just played out. Cryptographic guarantees beat social trust, always. A seed you cannot predict beats a promise that it was random.

Stay safe.

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

View from above as Starship launched from Pad 2 at Starbase

[Ledger @Ledger]

🌞 WIN the ultimate Ledger Summer Bundle 🔐

We're giving one winner the full kit, free from compromise:
3x Ledger Nano™ Gen5 touchscreen signers (you pick the colors)
3x Ledger Recovery Key™ PIN-protected backup card
1x Limited Edition Susan Kare clip-on Badge Pack
$80 Bitcoin voucher

To enter: Follow @Ledger + tag your summer buddies in the replies below 👇

[English1550 🇬🇧⚒️ @english1550]

Bitcoiners do cricket. #eng

[Satoshi Society @SatsSociety]

⚡️Southampton meetup tonight! ⚡️

[Bitcoin Events UK @BitcoinEventsUK]

The new Meetup Breakdown is out now - Issue 100! 🎂

🔸 12 Bitcoin meetups
🔸 1 upcoming event
🔸 100 issues!!

🇬🇧 Your weekly update on the UK Bitcoin scene.

Subscribe for free and don't miss a thing.
https://t.co/WKEu6Rqlzj

[Satoshi Society @SatsSociety]

⚡️Our next Bitcoin meetup in Southampton⚡️
📅Friday 26th June
⏲️7pm
📍Maritimo Lounge, Ocean Village, Soton SO143LG

The best part of Bitcoin isn’t the technology - it’s the people....come join us!

@BitcoinEventsUK
@BtcBeachBmouth
@btc_portsmouth
@Bitcoinshire
@purbeckbitcoin

[Frank Wright @frankwrighter]

Britain has been ruled into ruin by an extremist ideology.

International interests have replaced the National Interest.

Restore will end the political economy of national suicide.

[English1550 🇬🇧⚒️ @english1550]

English afternoon tea. Accompanied with Earl Gray & Champagne.

[English1550 🇬🇧⚒️ @english1550]

@SatsSociety pizza day meet up!

[Bitcoin Events UK @BitcoinEventsUK]

The new Meetup Breakdown is out now - Issue 95! 🗞️

🔸 21 Bitcoin meetups
🔸 1 new bitcoin-accepting business
🔸 1 upcoming events

🇬🇧 Your weekly update on the UK Bitcoin scene.

Subscribe for free and don't miss a thing.

https://t.co/JekasgUjik

[Jez Casey @Jcastweet]

No torches. No pitchforks.
Just sound money and a very long memory.
The UK Bitcoin community is coming.

[CheatCode @CheatCodeCon]

Lunch break in full swing 🍕🍺

[Satoshi Society @SatsSociety]

⚡️Our next Southampton Bitcoin meet-up⚡️

📅 Friday 24th April
⏲️ 7pm until late
📍 Maritimo Lounge, Ocean Village, Soton SO14 3LG

April 23rd was the silence of Satoshi. April 24th is the voice of the community....come join us!

@BitcoinEventsUK @btc_portsmouth @BtcBeachBmouth

[Voices of Liberty @FreedomVoL]

“Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.”

— Friedrich Hayek