The refund is usually what you paid, not what you dream that the device is worth.  If you paid in BTC, the amount to be refunded is the (amount of BTC you paid) x (BTC price at the time you paid).

Besides, if the Trezor it is worth more than 330$, then you should pay the difference to satoshilabs. 

That said, a company that sets prices and does its accounting in BTC knows nothing about marketing and even less about accounting.

Well, maybe, but there is also the little matter that bitcoin is a highly uncertain investment that has attracted an army of scammers and thieves. FINCEN's mission includes warning people about those risks.  I didn't see anything wrong with that report.

I am not a sophisticated investor, never gave a thought to the stock market.  My savings are in some investment fund offered by my bank.  If I save enough, I may put it in real estate.

I do not believe in the apocalyptic scenarios that some paint, they are obviously used to market alternative investments like gold or bitcoin, and funds thereof.  There will be crises, of course, but I am sure that stocks and the dollar will suffer less than bitcoin.  People will continue to work,d buy things, and pay taxes.  The companies that make those things will continue doing so, and the governments will continue to function.

Agree with you 80%. 

Wait, actually 100%: I am hodling too, as always.

Just to give one example, three of the 5 key holders at Trezor conspire and sign a malicious version of the firmware that is given to a hacker.  The hacker unleashes a virus with a malicious plug-in or standalone MyTrezor bridge, that instructs clients to download and install the "latest version" of the firmware, which is of course the malicious version above. 


Well, I hope that manufacturers can resist that temptation.


You mean, someone already checked it, and did not see the backdoor? 

If the computer is not secure (the premise of Trezor), the Trezor has some risks, but the paper wallet is not safe at all.

You mean like the scripts of Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, and of most languages in India?

There is a firmware source posted on github.  There is a firmware binary in each client's Trezor.  Note the indefinite articles.  Can you see the problem now?

Come on guys, this vulnerability not my entry for the Nobel Prize, it is an absolutely trivial and well-known observation.  If someone can get a malicious version of the firmware signed, he can easily trick many clients into installing it.

Hackers can even trick many users into installing an unsigned malicious version of the firmware and re-entering the recovery seeds.  Do I have to spell out the details?


We will see in a couple of years.   Judging by the mood of this thread, the Trezor will soon be storing your gaming site passwords, your calorie counts, your dog's gym workout schedule, ...

(The Brazilian voting machine software was very small at the beginning, too.)

Meanwhile, how long do you think it would take for one person to review 20'000 lines of code and make sure that it has no weaknesses (like a broken random number generator, or a line somewhere that sticks the private key into the signed transaction that is sent tout to the infected computer)?

I asked earlier whether the hardware has some sort of memory protection that would prevent one function from accessing data areas of an unrelated function, but got no answer.  If it doesn't, the dog workout code will have access to the bitcoin private keys; therefore that code, and every modification to it, must be verified with the same care that is spent on the bitcoin code proper.  Worse still if the firmware can modify itself.

The History of Dance dude can do the can-can, did you mean the History of Dunce daddy?

I don't think that potential GABI clients would be impressed by a 30% run-up following a 30% nearly vertical drop.  But maybe there are enough such suckers out there. 

By the way, has there been any professional review of bitcoin funds (SMBIT, PBP, and the new ones) in financial media -- apart from paid "adnews"?

Why would that be anything else than a dancer who dances the can-can?

Well, SMBIT should buy BTC only when someone buys fund shares from them.  And they should sell BTC when, and only when, some client liquidates his shares (sells them back to SecondMarket).  -- 10 shares = 1 BTC. 

So the question is, why aren't people buying more SMBIT shares?  Well, the value of 1 share (which is 1/10 of btcoin's market price, by definition) fell ~25% over the past month, and is again near the lowest it has been since November.  Clients who buy fund shares now will be chained to them for six months.   What will happen to the BTC price (and hence to the value of their investment) in those six months?

Add to that the FINCEN advisory ...

And then there is the matter that the BTC price is being determined by thousands of amateur day-traders in China.  Would you trust your savings to them?  I wonder if prospective clients are aware of this .

Can a can-can dancer scan a can?

Sorry to disappoint, but I didn't. 

I am only half bull, half bear, and half indifferent, but nevertheless admit my admiration for your awesomeness.

Suppose that the price drops to 15$ next Monday.  Will you still laugh at that "totally wrong" prediction? 

Indeed, and that is why I never wrote that.

A malicious manufacturer can distribute firmware that, instead of using truly random seeds,  chooses seeds from a very small set.  Then the manufacturer can  generate the private keys for all those seeds and find the one that matches the client's blockchain address.

This attack can be performed by the manufacturers, or by any individual or gang who can get hold of 3 of the 5 firmware signing keys.  Or by someone  who can plant the weakness in the firmware before it gets signed.  Or by anyone who can replace the Trezor by a counterfeit one during shipment to the client.  Or any shop that sells Trezors to walk-in clients.

I can think of a few other variants on this attack.  Surely criminals can think of dozens more.


If the manufacturers do steal your coins, in order to accuse them of deliberate theft you will have to prove, first, that the the source address of the fatal transaction was under your control at the time, and that the destination address was not.   Perhaps you can do that with witnesses, or internet access logs, but it seems quite hard.  (But,ok, that is a problem of bitcoin itself, not of Trezor.)  Then you have to prove that you did not leak the recovery key words inadvertently.  And then you have to prove that the destination address is under their control. 


On the contrary, a client who loses the coins that he kept in a Trezor may be able to sue the manufacturers for misleading advertising, even if they are innocent and the theft did not involve them directly.  (I haven't seen the Trezor warranty; I hope that they got the help of some smart lawyers, and thoroughly protected themselves from that risk.)  Of course the client would still face the problem of proving that the theft really occurred, as above.


As or checking the software, see my previous reply to another post.  As for it being single-purpose hence simple, I have seen several posts here requesting all sorts of features and support for things other than bitcoin.  I bet that the full source will soon have hundreds of thousands of lines of code.  (The Brazilian electronic voting machine, which does not even connect to the internet, has over a million lines of C/C++ source code, not counting the operating system.)

It is easier to find the private key of a bitcoin address by trial and error than to check all possible inputs of such a device.  (Translation, just to avoid misunderstandings: it is totally inviable.)

Each client will have to download and install a copy of the firmware at every update, so each client would  have to check that his copy matches the copy that the community has verified by compiling the source code.   That can be done by comparing the hashes of the firmware only; but how will the client get the correct hash to compare to, and how will he compute the hash of the downloaded copy, on an untrusted machine (which is the assumption that justifies using a Trezor)?


I am merely  pointing out a fact that should be obvious to anyone who really tries to evaluate the security of the system.

Just because something is "bitcoin" it does not mean that it is perfect.  While trusting a Trezor is certainly better than trusting a  random PC or smartphone, clients still must trust the manufacturers (their honesty, and their zeal in keeping intruders off the manufacturing and shipping process).

Checking the hardware is viable only with sophisticated lab equipment.  To check the software, someone whould have to carefully check the source code (at every release) for malicious backdoors or weaknesses, and then the client would have to check that the compiled firmware that he is loading, duly signed by the manufacturer,  matches that source code.  Obviously neither is viable in practice, except after the fact.

I did not say either of those things.

I did not accuse or defend Coinbase about anything, just pointed out what would obviously be their interest and need.

I did not say that middlemen taking a slice of the profit is corruption.  Obviously, if they did not do that, there would be no middlemen.  And of course they try to take as much profit as they can, like everybody else.


I swear by God, by God, by God, creator of heaven and of Earth, and by His manifestations visible and invisible, and by my Prophet Mohammed Al-Mustafa who taught and confirmed and showed the Faith that we Moors and Suleimans believe, and by the Quran in which it is written in Arabic the Faith that we have, and by the Psalter of David and by the Gospels of Jesus Christ and by the hundred and twenty four Prophets of God of which Adam was the first, and by the soul of the blessed my Father, and by the life of my children, and by my head, and by the sword that I carry that JayJuanGee is not a sockpuppet account that I created for the sole purpose of inflating the count of posts about my person.