Bitcoin

There are two opposing thoughts regarding money I am considering at the moment. On the one hand, we have the idea that to the extent it serves a nonmonetary purpose, it is an inferior form of money. For example, gold, which is a form of money, also has various other use cases as jewelry, industrial raw material, etc. These use cases compete against the monetary use case. Until Bitcoin, there was no contender for pure money. That Bitcoin lacked any other utility was hurled as a criticism. The idea was something like this: gold has various other utilities (and corresponding demand), so its price is unlikely to fall below a certain level; Bitcoin, on the other hand, due to absence of such alternate uses, would see its price collapse to zero some day. ...

In March 2021, Coinkite introduced an entropy bug into the firmware for their Mk3, Mk4, (and the yet to be produced Mk5 and Q) line. Instead of utilizing proper hardware-based entropy, the devices used software-based entropy partly predictable from the unique ID/serials, time/clock registers, and related states of their chips. The result: instead of utilizing 128 or 256 bit entropy, they were down to just 40 bits (for Mk3) or 72 bits (for the others), under optimistic assumptions. To grasp the difference in scale, see the video below. Essentially, the bug reduced the problem for the attackers from finding one atom in over a billion galaxies to finding one atom in a single organism. ...