Bitcoin Holds Firm Amid Hardware Wallet Heist and BIP-110 Split
A hardware wallet exploit and a minority-chain split have shaken Bitcoin's network in recent days, but the price of BTC has barely budged. The Coinkite-manufactured Coldcard hardware wallet was vulnerable to offline attacks that could reconstruct private keys, leading to an estimated $133 million in losses across 2,055 BTC.
The weakness was introduced in March 2021 and was embedded in seeds generated before a firmware update in July. Those affected were advised to create new seeds and move their funds. The incident has been treated as a product-specific security breach rather than a failure of Bitcoin's blockchain or monetary rules.
In the same period, a minority-chain split emerged due to the BIP-110 proposal, which sought to restrict nonfinancial data stored on Bitcoin. However, support for the proposal never reached 55% and was largely ignored by miners, with only a tiny fraction of the network's hash supporting it.