Bitcoiners use dice throws to secure assets after Coldcard hack

Bitcoiners are dusting off dice and turning to physical randomness after a hack on Coldcard, a popular self-custody hardware wallet, exposed weaknesses in how users generate and store seed phrases.

The Coldcard attack didn’t steal funds directly but revealed that some users had stored their 24-word seed phrases in ways that were vulnerable to extraction. Investigators found that many people had written their seeds on paper, stored them in cloud notes, or even kept them in password managers—all points of failure if a device or service is compromised. This has led some Bitcoin advocates to argue that the safest way to generate and store a seed is offline, using physical randomness like dice rolls, which can’t be hacked remotely.

The shift back to dice isn’t new, but it’s gaining traction. For years, Bitcoiners have debated the best way to create a seed phrase. Some prefer hardware wallets for convenience, while others swear by dice entropy, where users roll standard six-sided dice to generate random numbers that map to words in the BIP39 list. The method is slow—it can take hours to roll enough times for a full 24-word phrase—but it removes digital exposure entirely. The hack has made that trade-off look smarter.

What happens next could reshape how people secure their Bitcoin. Hardware wallet companies may add built-in dice roll features or better offline entropy tools. Meanwhile, communities like SeedSigner, which builds open-source dice-based seed generators, are seeing a surge in interest. For Bitcoiners, the lesson is clear: if your seed phrase exists anywhere a hacker can reach, it’s at risk. The simplest way to remove that risk might be the oldest—rolling the dice.