Show HN: Shardium – open-source "Dead Man's Switch" for crypto inheritance

4 pointsposted a month ago
by maxcomperatore

6 Comments

ycombinatrix

a month ago

I prefer to do a 4 shares / 2 needed for recovery.

I keep 2 on different storage media, 1 with a trusted beneficiary, 1 with a different trusted beneficiary.

This does mean that the beneficiaries can collude to rob me tho. But it is simpler than running & trusting some kind of live service imo.

maxcomperatore

a month ago

running 4-of-2 definitely removes the service dependency.

you highlighted exactly the "bug" i wanted to patch though: the collusion risk. if beneficiary A and B have a beer together, you get rugged.

the "live service" here acts purely as a time-lock. beneficiaries can't collude to rob you today because the 3rd shard isn't released until the dead man's switch actually triggers. it protects you from your own friends.

ycombinatrix

a month ago

You should consider highlighting that this can be used for way more than crypto wallets. The seed phrase can be used to restore a GPG key, a FIDO2 authenticator including SSH/WebAuthn, etc.

maxcomperatore

a month ago

100%. i actually use it for my gpg keys too. i need to make that clearer on the landing page so it doesn't look like a "crypto-only" tool. recovering ssh/fido2 backups is a huge use case. thanks for the feedback

reachableceo

a month ago

Why not use Vaultwatden for this ? It has a built in dead man switch recovery system.

maxcomperatore

a month ago

big fan of vaultwarden (i self-host it).

the main difference is architecture: shardium splits the secret (shamir) so the server never holds the full data, whereas vaultwarden holds the full encrypted vault.

also the "grandma factor": getting non-tech family to setup a vaultwarden account was friction. this is just "find paper in drawer, scan qr".