Fair enough, you had specified a freestanding seed so we were talking about slightly different things. You can of course go to extreme lengths to bootstrap a se

Fair enough, you had specified a freestanding seed so we were talking about slightly different things. You can of course go to extreme lengths to bootstrap a secure machine including manual input. Well actually that might be quite difficult in practice seeing as modern computers don't exactly accept punch cards. Presumably you had to prepare the digital media that provides the payload somehow. But regardless. The much more common scenario would be bootstrapping something like Guix from within a running OS from a much smaller set of initial binaries than you otherwise might. And that host OS could in theory have been compromised. But I think that attack is a significantly higher bar than a compiler binary that compromises itself.