Tribe Vibe - The 'Cold Card Truth' Edition
Editorial Note
Welcome to another exciting week in Bitcoin! Coming up:
🎓 Bitcoin 101: Your weekly resource to learn about Bitcoin
🗞 News: Trending News in Bitcoin
👩💼 Women in Bitcoin: Where the Bitcoin “Femergy” is happening
📆 Upcoming Events: Find the best spots to learn, connect and build
🎧 & 🎥Vibe of the Week: Our content recommendations
🎓 The Cold Card Hack Explained
The team at the Bitcoin Policy Institute put together an awesome short video explaining the issue.
📈 Trending News
1. The Network Has Spoken
The Scoop🕵️♂️: ICYMI there has been a heated debate ongoing for about a year with regards to “spam” on the bitcoin blockchain. Spam is usually defined as text or images on the blockchain as opposed to monetary transactions. However, one man’s spam is another man’s historical record. Moreover, the efforts to prevent/mitigate this so-called spam risked creating a situation where bitcoin could be censored. BIP-110 (also called the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork or RDTS) was a proposed temporary soft fork to limit arbitrary/non-financial data in Bitcoin transactions (targeting things like Ordinals inscriptions, large OP_RETURN payloads, etc.) for about one year. Mandatory signalling for BIP 110 began at block 961,632 on August 8, 2026. Enforcing nodes began rejecting non-signalling blocks, creating a minority chain, which only produced 2 blocks before stalling. Basically an epic fail.
Why You Should Care🚨: At Access Tribe we believe that keeping bitcoin censorship-free is critically important. We don’t agree that arguments about CSAM, inscriptions or ordinals being undesirable should override the need to ensure that the soundest money remains uncensorable.
What does this mean for bitcoin?✨: BIP 110, a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal to try to mitigate spam was a complete and utter failure. Good. Here is what Michael Saylor, Chair of Strategy B had to say about it:
2. The Cold Card Truth
The Scoop🕵️♂️: Coldcard was a popular Bitcoin hardware wallet designed to keep your private keys offline and secure. A firmware bug from 2021 caused many devices to generate recovery seeds (the secret phrases that control your Bitcoin) using weak, predictable randomness instead of true hardware randomness. Starting in late July 2026, attackers figured this out, brute-forced the weak seeds on regular computers, and drained over $100 million in Bitcoin from thousands of wallets without ever needing physical access to the devices.
Why You Should Care🚨: Hardware wallets are marketed as one of the safest ways to self-custody Bitcoin. This incident shows that a single coding mistake can make “secure” keys guessable years later. If you (or someone you know) created a seed on an affected Coldcard between 2021 and mid-2026, those funds may still be at risk. Updating the firmware doesn’t fix an already-weak seed. You have to generate a completely new one on fixed firmware and carefully move the coins.
What does this mean for bitcoin?✨: Bitcoin’s network and protocol weren’t compromised. The problem was entirely in how one hardware wallet generated keys. It highlights that self-custody only works if the tools that create your keys are genuinely random and thoroughly audited. One overlooked bug can put a lot of people’s savings at risk, so the community has to keep treating entropy and firmware quality as critical security issues.
📚 Some suspect that the Cold Card hack was an insider job. You can read more about that theory HERE.
👩💼 Women in Bitcoin
Michelle Weekley to speak at the Bitcoin Historico Conference November 11-12, 2026
🎟️ Tickets HERE.
📆 Upcoming Events
✨ Bitcoin Beyond 66 📅 August 14-15, 2026 - Bodø, Norway
🎟️ Join the gathering HERE!
Bitcoin above the Arctic Circle. A 400-strong gathering in Bodø, just past the 66th parallel, blending sound money conversation with the drama of the Norwegian summer landscape.
✨ Bitcoin Vibecamp 📅 August 17-23, 2026 - Roatan, Honduras
🎟️ Book your spot HERE!
A full week of bitcoin, sunshine and community on Roatan Island, hosted by the crew at Bitcoin District Próspera. Around 120 plebs gathering to build, learn and vibe in one of the most bitcoin-friendly jurisdictions on earth.
✨ Bitcoin Poker Champ 📅 August 25-29, 2026 - Roatan, Honduras
🎟️ Deal me in HERE!
For the more competitive Tribers, an intimate 40-player bitcoin poker championship on Roatan, also run by Bitcoin District Próspera. Sats on the felt, orange-pilled conversation between hands.
🎧 🎥📚 Vibe of the Week
🎓 Learn about Bitcoin HERE.
Where to Acquire Bitcoin:
Visit a Bitcoin Well ATM to purchase “private bitcoin” and check out their online services HERE (Access Tribe is an affiliate of The Bitcoin Well and may receive compensation for recommending their services).
Meme of the Week
Then there was Robert Breedlove…formerly respected bitcoin podcaster…
Thanks Robert. It’s very important to have evenly sized balls.
The comments were epic.
