Tracing the Stolen Coldcard Bitcoin w/ Galaxy's Alex Thorn

In this episode, Nik welcomes back Alex Thorn of Galaxy Research on the Coldcard key generation vulnerability and the theft that followed. Alex explains how a March 17, 2021 firmware change left the devices silently defaulting to a much weaker random number generator, a bug that went unfound for five years, and why the victims are self-custody holders who never leaked a key or made a mistake. He walks through Galaxy's on-chain tracing across three confirmed waves totaling roughly 1,350 bitcoin, or about $88 million, why the stolen coins are sitting inert, how cheap compute and open source AI models made the exploit trivial, and what Coldcard owners should consider doing now. The Bitcoin Layer and its guests do not provide investment advice.