2-of-3 Blind-Key Multi-Signature Security
blog.gridplus.ioOne of the huge problems that crypto-currencies do not think about is inheritance. Most of us wish that when we die, our stuff goes to our children. But if our stuff is locked behind secure cryptography which depends on information locked in our brains, that does not happen.
Unfortunately there is no way to open up ways of passing your crypto-currency to your loved ones without opening up a possible attack during your life. But this is a use case that needs to be addressed.
What I should do is create a 'contract' among some of my friends.
Require that N out of X friends agree that 'the will' needs to be opened; for that to be a contract the combinations for satisfying N need to be calculated out and those sequences of decryption the master decryption key setup.
Both the master key enciphered 'will' and the multi-party unlock blobs can be stored together, that way maintenance and updating everything is on the owner of the will. Obviously one additional copy of the master key for that would be kept in a file enciphered to just the owner's key.
They think about it a great deal, especially ones like Bitcoin with finite money supply that will become less and less accessible over time as people die or lose their keys. Ethereum for example built a money supply algorithm that adds a set amount of currency every year, resulting in an eventual equilibrium where the % of total money supply lost per year = % of total money supply added. This has been on peoples' minds since the early days.
Creating more currency is not necessary, all that’s needed — if a single currency unit becomes too valuable because it becomes too scarce — is to increase divisibility.
Why is increasing divisibility any better than creating more if the end result is the same?
Because by increasing divisibility you don’t change the distribution of wealth (how much people own relative to each other) whereas, if you create more currency, the recipient of the new coins is enriched on behalf of everyone else.
Have a transaction with some dead man switch logic that moves it into an account of your children? Let the timeout be 1 year. Of course someone could remove you from the internet for 1 year, but they always could could kill you too.
Or use a secret sharing scheme, similar as the article suggets, to leave keys with notaries and family members.
There is plenty of thinking about that. Search some of the bitcoin forums and you'll find tons of examples of people solving that problem in a variety of ways.
Check out www.zeropass.io they are working on passwordless key manager with recovery option over trusted contacts