What Initiative should take by the govt. and the hardware wallet providers?

[Hypnotizer]

How many people would even know what to check inside the wallet?

It only makes it more difficult for a common or a newbie investors to use because they have no idea about such technical. I myself will not even be able to tell if a hardware wallet had been compromised. It's not going to solve the issue.

Checking inside your hardware wallet isn’t that hard and there’re a lot of tutorial videos and guides on how to check it safely to see if it’s compromised or safe and even a non-technical person can do it.

Even on this forum, I think there’re quite a few guides about that (for ledger), so it’s not that complicated.

For example, will no one take responsibility for the users who lost their assets due to the firmware of hardware wallets? Can the regulator do anything here?

There’s nothing much the regulators can to here other than catch the hackers and return the stolen funds (if they can)…

The hardware wallet companies can’t take responsibility for the users lost, because they’ll claim they clearly disclaim liability for financial losses. And with that disclaimer, they can’t be held responsible.

[Multani Boy]

It's like any other service like CEXes, they were once good but slowly started getting worse (more restrictions, more blocking of random accounts, etc.) and since people still continue using them, they never bothered changing and improving. So as long as these hardware producers are selling their products, they are not going to bother doing anything to protect their users since they still have a good revenue.

Overall I think hardware wallet companies have less of a cushion to fumble with user trust than CEXes. Moving between exchanges is more of hassle due to various switching frictions like liquidity and trading pairs, so you may put up with shoddy service for longer.

Switching friction between hardware wallet companies is not very high, especially when it comes time to purchase the next shiny hardware wallet object. In Ledger case I am sure the CryptoBilis situation prompted lots of people to consider competitors as well as examine Ledger supply chain. It remains to be seen how much this will cost them in sales, if anything noticeable, but losing the trust factor is pretty bad when that is pretty much their main selling point.

Interesting indicator will be whether this causes them to tighten up their reseller screening and implement tamper evident packaging or whether they will just bank on newer users not knowing or caring about this stuff.

[Lontor]

1. Crypto wallet companies who created hardware wallets must all have mechanism that can detect tampering after buyers receive their devices, there should be a way to confirm if the hardware is still intact and nothing was switched.

2. Resellers needs to be scrapped, phones can have resellers, bitcoin miners can have reallers, everything else can have reallers but not hardware wallets because these things are banks where people store their hard earned money, no room for reallers.

3. New law should be implemented, whoever is caught or found tampering with brand new hardware wallets that's supposed to be delivered to the rightful owner will receive life imprisonment, for someone who can watch others put their life earned money in a safe and steal it all is already a killer.

[atookz]

Can't the matter be made so that the hardware wallet companies use transparent bodies so that when the user checks himself, at least the warranty will not be lost?

But, imo, a transparent case is a lesser cure than it seems. Seeing the circuit board through a clear shell only helps if you already know what the original looks like., and a swapped chip or tampered firmware can look completely normal to most of us. The worst one doesn't even require any physical transformation: a machine that comes with a preset seed will look just fine from the outside.

And if tampering is done by any official reseller, are the wallet providers completely exempt from liability? Then I think the government should cut off the reseller process or make the wallet providers take responsibility in case of any bad incident.

For the resellers, I don't think the manufacturers can wash their hands of it. They choose and list their resellers, so some of the responsibility for that distribution chain should remain with them. However, as regulators are not likely to do anything, I prefer to use user habits: purchase direct (if possible), always create my own seed, and use multisig for larger amounts.

[Cryptomultiplier]

To be honest i'm one of those who bought Ledger from CryptoBilis last 2021, from their Lazada store which is listed as authorized reseller. so the usual advice "buy only from authorized" is not enough anymore, we followed that already.
If we are talking about safety of every hardware wallet, even let's say you will buy it direct from the manufacturer, you can't still guarantee the safety as there are already past incidents happened like some exploitation, software issues, etc.
This is also one of the downsides of Bitcoin being decentralized, some says pen and paper only also making your Bitcoin safe too. I also can't see government can solve this.

Just as you already know, manufacturers never accept any responsibility and that's why they push blame unto the reseller or distributors who bear the responsibility.
So before they release their products they ensure contractual disclaimers with users to be at the mercy of their products and also ensure they fulfill their production quality demands.

[Dr.Bitcoin_Strange]

I have thought about this too but I came to a self conclusion that if the government are involved in matters like this, for example, if the victims that lost their Bitcoin during the Coldcard vulnerability were to take any actions to report the company or take legal action against them, it will require the victims to expose their identity to the government and that's what some Bitcoin holders does not want to do because they also know that by doing so, they are attracting government attention to themselves. Imagine revealing to the government that you had 10 or more Bitcoin, they would guess that you still have more in other wallets. 

It is fully the responsibility of the company to handle issues like this by making sure that they only have one authorized retailer chain that sells to users from each country, so that if Mr. A from country B face this kind of issue, the company would know the retailer to hold responsible for tampering with the wallet.

[moneystery]

Involving the government in this matter will not resolve anything; on the contrary, it will only complicate further matters and will not solve anything. It should be up to the hardware wallet providers themselves to resolve issues with the devices they supply.
After all, they are the ones operating in the hardware wallet industry; they cannot ignore this and assume that everything will be fine. As the number of problems with hardware wallets increases, this will affect users' perception of them and may lead to more people losing trust in hardware wallets due to their frequent issues. Ultimately, it is the hardware wallet providers themselves who will bear the brunt of this if they do not take any action.

[SquirrelJulietGarden]

For the resellers, I don't think the manufacturers can wash their hands of it. They choose and list their resellers, so some of the responsibility for that distribution chain should remain with them. However, as regulators are not likely to do anything, I prefer to use user habits: purchase direct (if possible), always create my own seed, and use multisig for larger amounts.

There must be existing contracts between the manufacturer and resellers and there are different responsibilities for both sides. Challenge is how to identify where the tamper happened and caused incidents as well as fund losses on manufacturers' customers. Remember that from manufacturers to resellers to users who buy hardware wallets, there are many shipping steps which are all risky but have chances for tampering.

I don't know, if there is no standard guide on how to detect tampering, you can not be sure that what you buy even at an official store of a manufacturer, is an intact wallet, and you can create seeds, store your funds safely.