Socratic Seminar 55
August 12, 2026
Event Time: August 12, 2026 at 06:00 PM EDT
We will start with introductions, cover some basic ground rules, and then jump into technical discussions.
Please note the meeting location is in room APEX 1 at 100 New Millennium Way, Durham, NC 27709, USA.
Announcements
- no pictures or recordings
- follow the chatham house rule
- discuss what was said, not who said it
- don't be a jerk
- thank you to our sponsor Fidelity Investments
- introductions
Self Custody
Special focus this month.
- Coinkite security advisory: Coldcard Mk3 seed generation warning
- Block: predictable RNG fallback and 32-bit reseed in Coldcard firmware
- btc++ insider: when randombytes runs but doesn't
- the reddit post that started it
- Kevin Loaec's analysis
- Rob Hamilton's analysis
- move funds off Coldcard single sig and Coldcard-only multisig ASAP
- discussion:
- the firmware checked whether the hardware RNG setting existed, not whether it was on, and shipped that way from March 2021. how does that survive five years of review?
- the affected seeds came from a pool of roughly a trillion candidates. could anyone have detected that from outside the device?
- does multisig help when every signer is the same vendor and the same firmware?
- what can a user actually verify about entropy on a sealed device?
Seed Generation and Entropy
- How to safely roll dice for your bitcoin seed
- button mashing entropy for Coldcard
- SeedPicker: draw your seed words out of a hat
- Seed Picker Solitaire: seed generation from a deck of cards
- printable BIP-39 wordlist for dice and coin flips
- discussion: how do you compute the checksum word without trusting a device or a website?
Bitcoin Core
- validation: fetch block input prevouts in parallel during ConnectBlock
- Stale Tip P2P message BIP draft
- Bitcoin Core 31.1 released
- doc: add an AI contribution policy
- Private Broadcast may reveal sender IP address
- silentpayments module implementing BIP352 merged into libsecp256k1
- maintainer turnover: sipa deletes his DNS seed and removes himself as a security contact, jonasnick steps down from secp256k1, theStack takes over
Covenants
- Ark + OP_TEMPLATEHASH: a covenant-enabled bark wallet on signet
- Bitcoin Inquisition 29.4 activated OP_TEMPLATEHASH on signet at block 314,928
- BIP 448: Taproot-native (re)bindable transactions
- input-triggered transaction expiry
Mining
- a clockless vardiff strands a slowing miner
- SRI interoperability test library
- Bitcoin after block rewards: preventing miner deviation as the subsidy approaches zero
- F2Pool mines two blocks at height 956,337
- the Mined in America Act
- reverse engineering the Canaan Avalon Nano3S
Privacy
- silent payments harvest-now-decrypt-later attack
- Sparrow 2.5.0 adds silent payment receives
- Babilonia: probabilistic coinjoin and covert betting