Comment by jmyeet

This is a cool attack from a technical POV, no doubt.

But what I want to talk about is trust. The big selling point of crypto has always been that fiat currencies, governments and the banking system can't be trusted. Your money can be seized. You may be subject to capital controls. Also, you're subject to chargebacks and so forth.

So crypto hasn't really eliminated the trust issue. It's just moved it. Instead of governments and the financial system having to be trusted, you're trusting far less accountable hardware vendors who might be completely trustworthy as far as you and they know but they can still be subject to supply chain attacks. An extreme (non-crypto) example of this is the Lebanon pager operation.

I've always maintained the crypto is largely solving non-problems and it treats things in the financial system as bugs when they're in fact features, such as reversible transactions.

Crypto transactions has significant limitations, such as everything needs to be on the blockchain (ie the so-called Oracle Problem), which is the whole reason we have stablecoins, etc.

People with this hardware wallet were largely very sophisticated users and even they couldn't successfully and securely manage a wallet. What hopes does the average Joe have?

The more time goes on, the more I'm convinced that crypto is a solution looking for a problem.