Rodolfo Novak (NVK), co-founder of Coldcard maker Coinkite, is deleting posts from his social media. Some people think Coinkite has also deleted recently content from its website.
The apparent elimination of these historical artifacts is concerning amid the ongoing theft of BTC from Coldcard customers.
For over five years, Coldcard hardware wallets generated private keys for customers with insufficient entropy. Since hackers discovered and began exploiting that vulnerability last week, they’ve drained over $130 million from victims.
The thefts continue as they crack insecure private keys using brute force computation.
For whatever reason, NVK has decided to remove certain pieces of content that he published over those five years.
Take, for example, in November 2024, when NVK wrote that a knockoff of his company’s Blockclock might be “a back door into peoples home network.” That post now resolves to an X error page. It went dark this week.
Bitcoin developer Peter Todd caught that deletion. On August 5, Todd posted the screenshot of the original post. “Deleted recently enough it seems it was still in my phone’s cache,” Todd explained.
Read more: What to do if you’re a Coldcard victim
NVK deletes posts about Coinkite, Coldcard
An archiving expedition is underway and a volunteer archive at nvk.wtf/receipts (Protos does not endorse nor recommend visiting unfamiliar websites) claims to be preserving evidence.
Coinkite critic Greg Tonoski alleged the company is deleting content from its website. “‘Unnamed v.4.0.0 security issue’ was deleted from the [coinkite.com/historical-disclosures] a few hours ago (see archived screenshot),” he wrote.
Matthew Kratter amplified that alleged deletion, asking, “NVK and Coinkite now deleting evidence from their website?”
That webpage today contains no entry by that “Unnamed v.4.0.0 security issue.” Coldcard also responded to Tonoski’s allegation, so whether the company inappropriately deleted anything is debatable.
Unfortunately, Archive.org’s Wayback Machine never archived that URL.
NVK hasn’t fully wiped, only selectively pruned, his personal timeline. For example, his pinned apology about the Coldcard failure is still up, saying, “I’m sorry and I’m devastated.”
His post about Blockclock knockoffs being a hypothetical backdoor for spyware is the most documented. Alex Waltz wrote, “NVK is deleting tweets as we speak,” while another Coldcard skeptic reposted the screenshot with his opinion: “NVK deleted this today. Every accusation is a confession.”
‘There is no need to panic’
NVK’s early response to the Coldcard bug is also under scrutiny. Hodlonaut posted a screenshot in which NVK claimed there was no need to panic, adding, “NVK deletes old tweets.”
No live copy of that post remains. Nonetheless, NVK tacitly admitted to writing-and-deleting it, conceding it contained “wrong” information that he intended to correct.
Another skeptic claimed NVK deleted a 2019 comment about Judaism. “I’ll post this here since he deleted the comment,” he wrote, attaching the alleged screenshot.
Zach Herbert of Foundation, a direct competitor of Coinkite, noticed an asymmetry. “What’s strange is the posts that arent deleted,” Herbert observed.
“Why hasn’t @DocHex or @switck deleted any posts?” referring to Coinkite’s co-founder.
“I originally assumed that Coinkite was under some kind of litigation hold,” Herbert continued, “but if that was so then NVK wouldn’t be deleting tweets.”
“NVK is currently deleting old posts from 2020 to try to clean up the history,” he broadcasted. “Screenshot them while you can. They will all be gone soon.”
Painfully, a celebratory post from Coldcard in October 2021 has survived with no deletion. “Coldcard makes retirement attacks impossible,” it declared incorrectly.
A follower asked it to define a retirement attack. Coldcard obliged, “It’s when the project makers could have a ‘bug’ in the entropy generation for later retrieval.”
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