Nick Neuman

Reinventing the Swiss bank for the sovereign individual | CEO & Cofounder of Casa @CasaHODL.

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

COLDCARD BTC MIGRATION VIDEO

Here is an explainer video showing you how to do two things:

1. Set up a Casa multisig with your current Coldcard and send the assets from the Coldcard to the multisig. This eliminates the risk of loss from the CC vulnerability. Useful for people who only have a CC and don't want to send to an exchange or hot wallet.
2. Second part of the video (starting around minute 7) shows moving assets out of the Coldcard Mk3 single sig. This might be useful for anyone trying to move their assets right now that hasn't touched their CC in 4 years.

Doing this was a fun reminder of how using a Coldcard outside of Casa is still surprisingly hard even though I know the gist of it and have been doing this for 8 years 😂.

If you want help migrating to Casa, DM me or the Casa account and we will direct you to the team.

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

@Kais3rP @CasaHODL We dont accept hardware wallet returns

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

@GenXBitcoiner What do you think Self Custody 2.0 looks like? What are the problems to solve and how does it feel to use it

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

Thoughts on the growing Ledger supply chain incident and security today:

It's a coincidence that this came to light so soon after the Coldcard incident, and doesn't look great for hardware wallets (even though this one doesn't appear to be Ledger's fault).

It's not a coincidence that security incidents in general are becoming more frequent in our industry and others.

The bad actors now have better tools than ever to try to steal your money. They can trivially look for software vulnerabilities with AI. They have mountains of data about you from a decade+ of unavoidable (for you) data leaks that helps them trick you with social engineering. And the value secured is juicy enough to attempt sophisticated supply chain attacks, because now we've seen that a successful attack on a random reseller can result in $100M+ stolen.

As regulations encourage more assets to be tokenized and the value of the whole ecosystem grows in general, we should expect more attention from sophisticated bad actors.

And we should also expect that there will continue to be vulnerabilities - whether that is in a hardware wallet or at a custodian.

This isn't only a problem in the crypto world either. It already affects traditional financial accounts in similar ways, and will probably get even wilder as people start connecting AI to their accounts.

The only answer is for you to assume things will be compromised and protect yourself accordingly by distributing your risk and eliminating single points of failure.

This is why we built Casa, and we can help you do it right.

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

@ipopflop We have it for stables already! ETH based stables

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

@dylbit @CasaHODL They all come in their original packaging, some of which (Trezor and yubikey) is tamper evident. A typical package is Trezors + yubikey so all tamper evident packaging.

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

@JamesKhoroshin @CasaHODL Thanks, I'll flag it for the team.

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

@JamesKhoroshin @CasaHODL What email did you send to?

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

@Friedrich__Wil @CasaHODL We don’t kyc by default so you can pay in BTC and then if you don’t want us to ship you hardware (in our premium plans and above where we do that) you can tell us and provide your own

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

The best thing you can do to protect your Bitcoin against this is to make sure that you are not reusing addresses that you have already spent from.

When you spend from a Bitcoin wallet on-chain, it reveals the public key(s) for that wallet. If the public key becomes known, then it could theoretically be reverse-engineered to crack the private key (in this hypothetical future where ECDSA is cracked). However when you deposit into a fresh address, it’s quite hard to correlate it to any specific wallet.

If you are using Casa, we manage this for you. When you send BTC from Casa, the change automatically goes to a new address in your wallet. Anytime you receive into Casa, we give you a fresh address without any deposits in it.

It's hard to say how likely it is that the core wallet cryptography underpinning Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies could be cracked by non-quantum means; but you certainly can't discount the fact that OpenAI and others are solving a ridiculous amount of long-standing mathematics problems right now.

I think this risk results in further necessary investigation (and transparency?) around how some of the largest exchanges and custodians are managing address reuse. Unfortunately address reuse has historically been a best practice at some companies for managing wallets, because it helps avoid fat-fingering and other human mistakes. It’s possible the cryptographic breakthrough risk will start to outweigh the human mistake risk.

I also think this is another great argument for why the distribution of risk via self custody benefits the Bitcoin network as a whole. We saw with the Coldcard exploit that it took time to crack many individual wallets, giving people time to move assets to safety. The more centralized the custody of Bitcoin is, the more risk there is from a vulnerability in wallet cryptography.

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for "bunker mode". My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash.

Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should consider moving the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction. And when they do sign one, they should also move remaining funds to a new address (possibly generated from the same seed phrase).

Don't rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don't panic either. Moving assets to protected addresses is a simple, preventative step which does not require new cryptography or new wallets.

IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years. By "break" I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster).

Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen. This includes the n log(n) bound for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture. In hindsight, May's unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot.

Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time?

Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure.)

Separately, as Ewin Tang can attest, an efficient quantum algorithm sometimes foreshadows an efficient classical one. We should be open to the possibility of a classical counterpart to Shor that breaks elliptic curves and RSA at once.

Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case.

I urge large, sophisticated actors to lead by example. Project11's "risq list" (bitcoin-risq-list.projecteleven[.]com) is a great tracker of exposed BTC pubkeys. Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage. Next month I'll address institutions in London in a live Q&A (forum.ethereuminstitutional[.]org/london-2026).

Again, please do not rush. Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from "Satoshi's shield", i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each. Load-bearing signers like oracles and L2 security councils should consider rotating ECDSA pubkeys with every signed message and/or multi-signing with a hash-based schemes like SPHINCS.

Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography. My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies. A single battle-tested hash (e.g. from the SHA or BLAKE families) yields plausible post-AI security.

The Ethereum roadmap on strawmap[.]org fully embraces hash-based cryptography with end-to-end formal verification as a response to the quantum threat. Those timelines must now be revisited and accelerated in light of mathematical superintelligence. I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration.

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

@TylerDurden @CasaHODL @Trezor 🫡

[Tyler @TylerDurden]

Skip all the bullshit, all the threads people write about protecting your bitcoin and do this:

Go directly to @CasaHODL that’s it. You’ll need a @Trezor but I’m telling you when I started using them in 2019/20 for Bitcoin I couldn’t even move my coins. Let alone a hacker lol

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

@FixxTheMoneyy @Strike @River If you want to self custody, Casa will fix all of your problems including the stress

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

@benvhodl @CasaHODL No it's not. It has the same level of vulnerability to broken cryptography as a fresh address from a single sig, which is to say it should be zero

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

@Orion3218 Yea I was just trying to simplify for most people

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

@DylanKoch2 @TheGuySwann @BTCsessions @stephanlivera @ODELLXYZ Was my explanation not plain enough? I actually tried to explain simply so I'm interested in what you thought was too confusing. Always trying to improve my writing

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

@JulianMoncadaNY @CasaHODL

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

@embirico I’ve run into problems getting it to spin up other threads for tasks that I want to be standalone. I used to have one main chief of staff codex thread and it seemed more capable for actually using all the features of codex/chatgpt than the dot.

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

@alexandr_wang The most important thing you guys can do right now is make the model smarter and not talk like ��old AI” (pre opus 5.5 and Astra). That’s the main thing keeping me going to others like Instinct

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

@signulll Agreed. They need a better design leader in multiple areas

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

Why are AI companies so bad at unique product brand design?

First logos are a swirly circle shape

Then everyone uses the sparkle ✨ to represent AI features

Now AI agent bots have to be these vaguely personified blobs

Oh and they all do launch videos out of mid century modern offices with light wood tones

The products are truly amazing but the brand design doesn’t do them any favors to differentiate themselves

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

Another example today with Gemini 4 Argon.

Anthropic models are named with types of stories

OpenAI starts using space themes

Google is like “hmm we need a theme, let’s go with the periodic table���

Groupthink everywhere!

[Nick Neuman @Nneuman]

Why are AI companies so bad at unique product brand design?

First logos are a swirly circle shape

Then everyone uses the sparkle ✨ to represent AI features

Now AI agent bots have to be these vaguely personified blobs

Oh and they all do launch videos out of mid century modern offices with light wood tones

The products are truly amazing but the brand design doesn’t do them any favors to differentiate themselves