Tyler Burns on Nostr: I know now is a popular time to shit on ColdCard and that's certainly justified. But ...

I know now is a popular time to shit on ColdCard and that's certainly justified.

But it really was a wallet with some great features. Everyone seems to be touting dice rolls at the moment to avoid relying on a vendor's RNG, but that's not exactly user friendly. There is also the multi-sig approach so that you don't need to rely upon a single vendor's key generation for security. That's great too, but is also brings about additional complexity for the average user to maintain.

So I'm here to tell anyone with a ColdCard brick at the moment, not to throw them away just yet.

One nice feature it has is SeedXOR. Originally marketed as a way to more securely backup your seed phrases, it allows you to take a single seed phrase and split it into multiple valid seed phrases that can then be stored securely on metal plates as backups without the risk of theft if any single plate is stolen.

However, if you do this process in reverse, you take multiple seed phrases and combine it into one single seed phrase, you can effectively take multiple seed phrases from multiple sources/vendors and combine them into one usable and more secure seed phrase. You're effectively combining the entropy from multiple sources into this single seed phrase.

Like, multi-sig, you're now not relying on any singular vendor's RNG process, but the end result is you're still using a single-sig setup (it can be used with a passphrase as well). One single seed phrase to backup without the complexity of multi-sig, if that's what you prefer.

The ColdCard comes into play because it has the SeedXOR feature on it that allows you to perform this function offline, keeping your seed phrases from ever touching an internet connected device.

So you can take a Jade, Trezor, laptop with Sparrow, phone with Bluewallet and use those seed phrases to create one more robust seedphrase that you can then import into your preferred hardware wallet for use.

I'm not shilling for ColdCard, I'm just providing a good idea that can be used to potentially increase your security and decrease your reliance on any single vendor while providing a potential use case for that ColdCard you already have the will never get used again.

SeedXOR is genuinely a good idea and XOR'ing secrets has been around for a long time. It is also probably more user friendly than rolling dice...maybe.