TRUST NO ONE, THEY SAID — TURNS OUT YOU WERE THE WEAK LINK

Alex Bergeron sat down with Marty Bent and said the thing the ColdCard incident made unavoidable: the lone self-custodian, one device, one seed, one person’s operational discipline, is his own single point of failure. The dogma said trust no one. The firmware flaw — weak keys from a device the purists trusted precisely because it was pure — showed that “no trusted third parties” had quietly become “trust one party completely: yourself, plus whoever wrote your firmware.” The Technologist read: this is not an argument against self-custody, it is an argument for engineering it like the protocol engineers everything else — no single point of failure anywhere in the stack. Multisig across different devices from different vendors. Collaborative custody where another key holder can stop a mistake but cannot move your coins. Geographic and vendor diversity, inheritance paths that do not die with you, and the wrench-attack math taken seriously. Purity is not a security model; architecture is. The exit option stays sacred — keys you control, a door out of every arrangement — but sovereignty was never supposed to mean solitude. Distribute the risk. Keep the exit. Run it like infrastructure, because that is what it is.