Rolling Dice to Generate Fresh Entropy on Coldcard Devices

stackernews-rolling-dice-fresh-entropy

Organisation: Stacker News
Evidence role: Community discussion
Published: 2026-08-13
Source changes: 0
Detected differences: 0
Unreviewed: 0
Copies held: 1

Nittany asks whether rolling dice to provide user entropy produces safe seeds on COLDCARD Mk4, Mk5 and Q devices in the wake of the ongoing incident. The thread documents an owner's effort to keep using an existing signer by supplying external entropy rather than trusting its RNG. Held as a dated mitigation question and community response to the vulnerability. The claims and assumptions are the poster's own and are not verified here. Captured through the site's public GraphQL API: the rendered pages crash the capture tab, and the API answers POST from this host. The query fixes the captured surface to the item's title, text and two levels of comments, each with author and absolute timestamp.

Every check is recorded, including checks that found no text change. A detected edit is therefore bounded between two checks. The publisher's exact save time is not observable from this record. Last checked 15 Aug 2026, 12:30 UTC.

Earliest copy held Current

seen 15 Aug 2026, 01:52 UTC · Captured here 2,009 chars

What changed from the previous capture 0 lines

Extracted text as captured

{
  "data": {
    "item": {
      "comments": {
        "comments": [
          {
            "createdAt": "2026-08-13T23:30:55.302Z",
            "text": "If you do need to use a Coldcard update the firmware first.\n\nYou can then verify that the dice roll function is working by using iancoleman.io and enter the same dice rolls to see if they match. That should be enough for generating new seeds offline, but might be a good idea to look into some other options for sending and receiving. I think Coldcard is done meaning that no one will be working on maintaining it.",
            "user": {
              "name": "OT"
            }
          },
          {
            "createdAt": "2026-08-14T07:23:23.405Z",
            "text": "[![BTC-beggar-dicer.jpg](https://i.postimg.cc/cCL7FSTc/BTC-beggar-dicer.jpg)](https://postimg.cc/N9Zr0Z3y)",
            "user": {
              "name": "DarthCoin"
            }
          }
        ]
      },
      "createdAt": "2026-08-13T22:09:32.417Z",
      "text": "I know with the whole Coldcard fiasco going on, and still going on, this might be a touchy subject.\n\nBUT I don’t have an easy way to get my hands on another signer. My situation doesn’t call for one to sign but I would like to roll dice to generate more seed phrases to be used for different purposes.\n\nTo my understanding the bug was from a software update introduced a couple years ago that turned a true number generator into a “pseudo” random number generator. That was it, nothing else.\n\nMy question is if I bring in my own entropy and randomness to any Coldcard device (Mk4, Mk5, or Q), is the seed generated safe to use?\n\nThe device is completely offline and will\nbe run in a stateless environment. The only true purpose of the device would be to generate the last word and provide the valid checksum in in need for.\n\nWhat are your thoughts?",
      "title": "Rolling Dice to Generate Fresh Entropy on Coldcard Devices",
      "user": {
        "name": "Nittany"
      }
    }
  }
}

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