Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard. Nearly forgot to put this up, whoops)
There was a cryptocurrency wallet hack the other day which has so far gone unremarked here because the popcorn is stale and we all pivoted to AI. And yet there are dozens of voices of bagholders crying out in pain wanting to be heard. This is their story.
For some reason the best explanation comes from a boring company that makes point of sale credit card readers https://engineering.block.xyz/blog/predictable-rng-fallback-and-32-bit-reseed-in-coldcard-firmware
Oh hey they got the most important thing not to get wrong wrong in the regulation free
moneysettlement layer of the future.The bug? Well in one file they wrote
#define MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG 0, and a library they depended on had this code:# ifndef MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG # error "get a HW TRNG plz" # endifThis should have caused a build failure, but since MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG was defined, to zero, it did not and instead continued down an insecure codepath.
As a C++ programmer this isnāt an unheard of sort of mistake to make in the moment. Many libraries use undefined for preprocessor variables, but there are some people who also use zero.
But itās less excusable to not catch it when this is literally the most important thing to get right in a bitcoin wallet. Did they not trace the code path when writing the code? Did they have no integration tests or unit tests for RNG seed quality? Poor RNG seeding has come up a ton in literature, so is the sort of thing people writing cryptographic code should check forā¦
Weāll have to addend that old saying: ādonāt roll your own crypto unless the other personās crypto is from a blockchain developer in which case youāre probably better off rolling your own after all.ā
I personally donāt want to sneer at the bagholders too much here. Itās 2026 and at this point it just feels kinda sad. But Iāll end this comment with this glowing review:
āItās open source, so anyone can verifyā ā unfortunately for them the verifier was also a hacker.
I was gonna link someone elseās observations on it, but got sidetracked by a shiny object or something.
https://mastodon.catgirl.cloud/@49016/117021988214007605
They didnāt link the sources, but apparently the all-my-apes-gone twitter crowd are still breathtakingly ignorant of technology and statistics, despite how many years of bitcoin catastrophes have passed.
Posted entirely unironically, apparently. Hard to say, but Poeās law has yet t be repealed.
New things I think learned from this thread:
the thief used a blockchain provider instead of an ad-hoc local node, making all the transactions incredibly traceable with (unclear to me) implications about their ability to launder them or keep their identity concealed indefinitely.
even if they are found out, the previous owners probably wonāt see a dime back since the vulnerability affects exactly the ability to prove you really were the previous owner.
Unclear which thief since the web3isdoinggreat writeup says there had been up to 15 unique groups doing mass drains by 31/7, maybe the initial 500 wallet sweep was one person or group?
enjoy ur hypertopical vibecoded website du jour
https://coldcardwatch.com/
Hahaha
All the dice discourse in particular has made this a fun throwback to the days of crypto bros earnestly arguing about which wall in your house you should hide your hand-stamped seed phrase record inside and whether you could trust a published book of truly random numbers over a series of 256 coin flips. Ironically I can only assume that by the time any of the concerns about entropy sources were validated most of them lost their crypto to some combination of get-richer-quicker ponzi schemes and twitter DMs claiming to definitely be FTX tech support.
Also, most of the would-be verifiers are frying their brains with AI
Iāve been following it a bit, thereās a lot less comedy gold to mine nowadays
here are some links from another forum
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/07/31/major-bitcoin-wallet-flaw-drains-594-btc-in-25-minute-sweep (crypto shill outfit link)
https://bitcoinenthusiast.org/uploads/31820a53956b53c5/image.png
https://bitcoinenthusiast.org/uploads/c0804335a52922e4/image.png - this last is attributing to malice whatās clearly stupidity