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Showing 3 of 3 results by pigsonthemoon
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Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Secure private key restore
by
pigsonthemoon
on 14/01/2025, 20:56:18 UTC
Thank you all for participating this discussion.

Let me explain why I think it's important to have a key recovery mechanism with BTC. And I understand all privacy concerns, that's why, I see all proposal here as optional, but most likely suitable for large scale BTC adoption.

Assumption: For the majority of people around the globe, the smartphone will be used as a wallet. There are people using feature phones to make BTC payments already, because they can't afford a smartphone. So probably, not all can afford to buy another hard wallet, and have the possibility to store this wallet securely.

Scenario: Imagine some people living in Asia 2004, having stored their BTC on a hard wallet, as every Bitcoiner suggest to do, maybe they also have some paper backup.
Within minutes, a Tsunami arrives, destroys your house, you are losing your friends and family, and if you are lucky, you find yourself and them a few days later still living.

Now, despite you lost your houses and your whole life changes from one day to the next, you also lost all your money. Everything, you put aside for later, maybe also for the future of your kids is gone. You have no chance to claim your private key or seed phrase. It's gone, unless you have shared the seed phrase with some trusted person in a different country / area.

How can technology help to fix this issue? How do you imagine this should be fixed in a BTC world?

All that self-custodial thinking is useless in such a scenario. And that's just one out of many scenarios, when people suddenly have to leave their homes, and have no chance to take their smartphone or hard-wallet with them, because you may lose important minutes or seconds to save the life of someone you love.

I am definitely not a pessimistic person, but these are real problems BTC will face when it comes to mass adoption.

Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Secure private key restore
by
pigsonthemoon
on 23/12/2024, 12:50:55 UTC
thanks for your feedback.

I don't think the private key or seed should go online, but maybe allow it to be distributed to a trusted group of people.

And I don't think there must be an instant recovery for lost keys, it's like you lost you credit card, you may have a short term problem and you are unable to pay. But the fact that you can go back into your bank, is still there. It's not like you lost your whole amount.
I am really talking about the "last resort". And as an independent person, I want to decide to whom I give acces to my keys. And not just an institution, which, then becomes more and more powerful (which might be the insurance industry, if you think of it in the future).

And technology is only useful it it solved problem to people or to the real world. Otherwise there is no value (that's why customer centric design etc. was evolved). And imho this problem is not solved with Bitcoin. And we cannot expect that everyone will manage this by themself, or educate themself in that details as people do who are very much involved with Bitcoin.

Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Topic OP
Secure private key restore
by
pigsonthemoon
on 23/12/2024, 10:25:43 UTC
Hi, I would like to open a discussion about an idea which I have since couple of months. So maybe some people here are interesting in joining this discussion.

I think one of the biggest challenge with Bitcoin is that there is no standard process to recover a private key. When you lose it, it's gone. You are fully responsible for keeping it secure, but also to keep it safe. This gets a lot of people out of Bitcoin, because all of sudden, they become fully responsible for their own money. It's like you have a lot of cash, and now only you need to make sure that you (A) you hide it to prevent it from being stolen (B) you never forget where you have hidden all your money.

Because it's difficult to solve a and b together, it becomes easier to trust a third party like a bank. Most people have other problems than constantly worrying about their money, which is, of course a good thing Smiley

So, if would have a physical key to my secure deposit, i would hand over a copy to the most trustful person in my life (which is usually a partner or someone within your family). But you can also slice the key into smaller chunks, and give it to some of your friends, where you know only them together can open it up. And if one friend disappears, the others can still open it. As far as I understood, this is multi-sig, which already exists for Bitcoin.

Now, the crucial question: Could the name (or let's say some identifier) of my friends somwhere be stored secure, in an encrypted way? The "name" of my friends would usually something like a SIM or MAC address; in TCP/IP stack at network layer (or physical link in OSI model). Because this is where we all get connected, either with a modem at home (for fix line access), or with a SIM card for mobile networks. And I would argue that most of people using Bitcoin have either one of those two access (unless you are constlantly using public WiFi / enterprise WiFi).

So if we could bring this part into Bitcoin, we could probably solve the issue with lost keys. It doesn't mean that anyone has to use it, but for those you want to define some people who could act as a backup, that would be awesome, if this gets standardized, and without having any other blockchain, token etc.

Because if that's the case, I could define a group of real people, which are able to recover my key, in case I would lose my key, e.g.

Alice
Bob
Charlie
David
Eve
Frank
Grace

Out of these 7, at least random 5 people must agree to unlock the key. Or Alice & Bob can do it alone, because they are my kids, and I trust them that they would never steal my money. Because we trust people in our life all the time, and, at least my perspective as a bitcoiner, I would rather trust some very close people around me than an anonymous institution like a bank, to solve problem (B) from my introduction text..

I know this is probably the part of multi-sig (which I don't fully understand technically, but the concept).

But I think the issue is, that those people should not have to carry part of this key with them, but rather having is somehow automatically technically assigned in a way they access the internet (and this data being encrypted).
For mobile network access (SIM), there are MSISDN (phone number), IMSI, ICCID, IMEI (device)
For fixed network access (depending on technology, if xDSL, Docsis or Fiber) it's MSIDN (phone number), OTO number, and/or MAC.

Of course there are some other identifiers which could be used. And the tricky thing is they can change over time (SIM switch, network operator switch, relocation etc.) But it's unlikely that all identifiers change for all of your 7 people immediately, under "normal" circumstances.

But I am basically wondering if it's possible to use something from the network layer and combine it with the application layer (where Bitcoin is, at least from my understanding how the internet is working)

And yes, this may break anonymity for people, but made for some people it's a good trade off.

Happy to hear some good input Smiley I hope I could explain a bit the idea.