Jonathan Goodman followed the rules for keeping his bitcoin safe.
The hardware wallet holding his keys, a Coldcard, had never been connected to the internet. He kept it stored in a safe deposit box. The seed phrase, which he’d never shared with anyone, was stored in a second safe deposit box. But on July 29, Goodman stated, every wallet he had was emptied, every last satoshi stolen. The Toronto entrepreneur reported losing 18.25 bitcoin, worth just over $1.17 million at the time of the attack.
“Perhaps the hardest part about this is that I did everything right,” he wrote in an Aug 1 X post.
Goodman’s loss was part of a much larger hack impacting thousands of Coldcard users. Galaxy Research stated it had high confidence that 1,596 bitcoin — worth over $100 million — had been stolen from about 7,300 addresses in a series of attacks. Galaxy research head Alex Thorn estimated on Aug. 4 that at least 15 different attackers were exploiting the flaw. None of them needed physical access to a device.
