Quote from: JayJuanGee on Today at 06:44:48 PM

Quote from: OutOfMemory on Today at 01:21:10 PM

Fun story written by life:

Today i got to dip my toes into a situation like "getting rekt".
Some of you might remember i was on vacation a few weeks ago. What i did, like every time when i leave the house for more than a day, i moved my hardware wallet out of the building and hid it, along with various obfuscated forms of passphrases and seed word lists. Those who know me from here for longer will not be surprised that i totally forgot about this, initiated a small transaction in the ledger frontend today, and as prompted to connect the thing, i went for the usual place i store my ledger in.

Me: Shocked

Also me: Fuck! I guess i have left the stick somewhere, the kids were playing with it until they dropped it somewhere and my beloved wife threw it away, in belief that it's a stupid toy radio or whatever.
Me, after a while of searching: Hey, at least i got the seed words, time to take and use them...
Me, again: Fuck!
There were no seed lists anymore.

I can't describe how exactly i felt like in this moment and in the following 25 minutes, which were probably some less, but time was like standing still. I kept looking for the thing, constantly switching mood between desperation and hope.

About half an hour later i remembered my old habit of moving important stuff out of the house, made plans to lay out the most likely places to search in, and not even 20 minutes later i found the seedwords and ledger again.

As funny as it may sound, i was quite frightened (and also sweaty) until i found the stuff again.

I am pretty sure that the most common ways that people lose their coins has been by locking themselves out of them.. so even if your memory was not having to remember complicated things, it still needed to remember some basic details.. and then what happens if you are the ONLY one to know this information.. and something happens to you? Maybe someone finds it? Maybe they don't find it for 40 years or longer? And when they find it, does it help anyone? or anyone then living who you care about.. maybe even the "wrong person" finds it 40 years later.

Next of kin. I knew that he had some coins.. but I cannot remember where or how many. Similar things have happened to me. I have some "cheat sheets," and I am trying to figure them out.. They are "easy" but even I am having trouble figuring them out, so what is going to happen to "next of kin" when they forgot what they were even supposed to be looking for..?

Oh yeah, those 30 bitcoins that were bought in 2015 and were lost in 2018 now happen to be worth quite a bit of money.. should we just ignore the amounts since we never had access to those coins anyhow? So what daddy OOM had left the coins to us.. it's kind of an abstraction regarding were there coins there or not? Part of my point is that it can difficult to find things, even when you know what you are looking for, and part of the question might be whether next of kin (heirs) are going to really be inspired to figure matters out if they might not be sure (exactly?) what they are looking for?

Quote from: Gachapin on Today at 01:27:21 PM

Quote from: OutOfMemory on Today at 01:21:10 PM

[edited out]

maybe consider using shamir backup..

How does that help? You can leave your secret out in the open and no one knows what it is?

mmh.. close...

if I get it right:

if someone knows one seed, it's worthless until you get all needed seeds..

For example, you could have a 4 of 7 shamir backup (shares: 7, threshold: 4), and only if you know all 4 "seeds" (shares) you can access the coins ...provided you also know the pass phrase.
Any lower number of shares is worthless.

Even if someone finds half of the shares it doesn't lower the security of the other ones. Shares are completely worthless - just until the point you get the last needed share for reaching the threshold...

You can have up to 16 shares and choose the threshold. So even if you loose shares or people find them it's no problem.
That way you could give shares to friends ans relatives and it doesn't matter if some knows them or even loose them, as long as you have enough shares left to reach the threshold.

Of course this system has some weaknesses to consider as well, but it's much better than a single phrase or multisig imo