--- title: "My trust in you is broken" date: 2026-08-03 author: Fernando Nikolic tags: ["Opinion"] url: https://perception.to/bitcoin-media-research/my-trust-in-you-is-broken description: "You know what happened and I'm not going to walk you through the timeline. I want to talk about what it says about us, and then about the thing underneath it that I think few people are going to admit to, which is that a Bitcoin-only company cannot afford to secure your Bitcoin. Nobody did the work Warren Togami said the thing that rearranged this for me. None of my engineer friends have CC. I had no idea CC had so many users. I'm afraid the most vulnerable to CC were those listening to i" image: https://cms.perception.to/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-03-at-12.58.44---PM.png --- # My trust in you is broken You know what happened and I'm not going to walk you through the timeline. I want to talk about what it says about **us**, and then about the thing underneath it that I think few people are going to admit to, which is that a Bitcoin-only company cannot afford to secure your Bitcoin. ## Nobody did the work Warren Togami said the thing that rearranged this for me. > None of my engineer friends have CC. I had no idea CC had so many users. I'm afraid the most vulnerable to CC were those listening to influencers instead of engineers. NVK had antagonized engineers years ago which didn't help a white hat to be able to find this before black hats. > > — Warren Togami (@wtogami) [August 3, 2026](https://x.com/wtogami/status/2084119172733133297?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=cms.perception.to) Warren and I overlapped at Blockstream, and he's right that the people most exposed were the ones who had been trusting and not verifying. That's the whole thing, really. We tell ourselves a story about this culture, that we're the ones who verify, that we don't trust, that we read the code and run the node and check the hash. And then a flaw sat in published firmware for five years and the answer to "why didn't anyone catch it" turns out to be **because nobody was looking**, because looking is too much work and believing in an ideology is free. I've been guilty of this. When I discovered Bitcoin many years ago I bought into all those maxi narratives. Lucky for me that I started working at Blockstream in 2021 and ditched my Ledger for a super-paranoid solution, but I'm an edge-case and I know most people are not like me. The general population will outsource their judgement to the vibe of whatever thing that squares with their already stated beliefs and called it a day. We say "open source" in this space like the words do the work for us. ## Where the eyes actually were So I went and looked at what the biggest accounts were paying attention to while the coins were moving using the [@BTCPerception](https://x.com/@BTCPerception?ref=cms.perception.to) MCP. ![](https://cms.perception.to/content/images/2026/08/image-1785757571158.png) [](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOy5VyXXMAAIQ3m.jpg?ref=cms.perception.to)For the two weeks before the drain surfaced, BIP-110 was running seventy to a hundred mentions a day across everything I track. Coldcard was running about one. The lines cross on 30 July. The "community" spent its entire attention budget on a *purity fight* about which lawful transactions deserve to exist, while a five year old flaw in seed generation emptied the wallets of the most committed people in Bitcoin. I guess this is just what culture does. It decides what counts as important, and this culture has decided for years that ideological positioning counts and unglamorous engineering review doesn't. We reward the guy with The Take. We do not reward the guy who discovers a flaw and posts about it. We don't flag stuff as a community, and in [@Coinkite](https://x.com/@Coinkite?ref=cms.perception.to)'s case, they ignore it when it is actually flagged. ## The part I actually want to say SO here's where I think this goes, and I've been chewing on it since Friday. Coldcard built a business by picking a very narrow audience. Hardcore Bitcoiners, Bitcoin-only, no altcoins, no compromise, difficulty as a feature. That positioning obviosly worked, just look at the noise it generated relative to its size. ![](https://cms.perception.to/content/images/2026/08/image-1785757773898.png) [](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOy6GsVWcAEbK7s.jpg?ref=cms.perception.to)Over the last twelve months the Perception corpus carries 746 mentions from leading industry accounts of Coldcard against 800 for Trezor and 638 for Ledger. That is a company with a *tiny* fraction of Ledger's headcount and capital sitting at 93% of Trezor's share of the conversation. The narrative was enormous. The company was small. (You can check the second half of that yourself, Ledger has raised hundreds of millions and staffs accordingly, Coinkite is famously a handful of people. That asymmetry is everything) Which is a natural outcome of purity constraining your market. A narrow market constrains your revenue. Your revenue is what funds security research, formal verification, red teams, external audits, the boring expensive machinery that finds an entropy bug before an attacker does. If you only ever sell to Bitcoin maximalists, you will always be a small shop. And small shops cannot fund the security that self-custody actually requires. For most of Bitcoin's history you could get away with that, because finding a subtle flaw in seed generation required a rare human with rare skills and a lot of time. That's changing right now. Open weight models are already finding vulnerabilities in codebases at a speed and cost that would have sounded like science fiction three years ago, and they are going to get better every single quarter. The economics of attack are collapsing. The economics of defence are NOT. Defence against that is a budget line. It's a permanent team, continuous adversarial review, fuzzing infrastructure, people whose entire job is trying to break your own product. That costs millions a year, forever, and it scales with the value you're protecting. IMO there are two ways to have that budget. Be a very large company with real product-market fit and thousands of employees. Or be a company whose mission is to get that large, which in practice means serving more than Bitcoin, because Bitcoin-only is not a big enough market to fund it. So the uncomfortable conclusion: **the security self-custody needs will not be built on a Bitcoin-only standard** because Bitcoin-only is a business constraint, and security is bought with money. I hold Bitcoin only. I still think that's right for me. But I don't think the thing that eventually secures my coins is going to be made by people who share that constraint, and I've had to sit with that this weekend. ## What this looks like next A few things follow, and I'd rather write them down now and be wrong in public. Consolidation. The small purist vendors either get acquired, get funded properly, or get found out, and I don't think the timeline for that is long. Insurance and custody get more attractive relative to solo self-custody because the market is finally pricing the risk honestly. There are already threads on r/Bitcoin from just 2 hours ago asking whether it's [time for closed source](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ve8uzt/?ref=cms.perception.to), whether people should [leave self custody](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ve78fm/?ref=cms.perception.to), and whether to [sell coins for a spot ETF](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ve1fai/?ref=cms.perception.to). And the reputational moat that Bitcoin-only branding provided (the assumption that ideological alignment implies technical rigour) is gone.