Dice Rolls Protect Coldcard Users, But Not Everyone Will Bother

The recent Coldcard fallout has pushed dice-based seed generation into the spotlight. Some users now treat it as essential, while others say it protected their funds during a firmware problem that exposed an estimated 1,128.6633 BTC from about 1100 addresses.

Claude Shannon's work on entropy explains why dice rolls are difficult to predict. Each face of a fair six-sided die has the same one-in-six chance of appearing, giving each roll roughly 2.585 bits of entropy.

However, many people find rolling a die 99 times and entering every result accurately to be too much work. The mathematics may be strong, but the result is only as secure as the user's procedure.