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by thatha7777 3127 days ago
Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme (ssss) would allow you to encrypt your recovery words in such a way that you could distribute the encrypted recovery words to N parties, and require the knowledge of K parties (n < k) to decrypt the secret.

ssss doesn't rely on any trusted party--for example, you could split into 5 "shares", and set a threshold of 3. Then distribute the shared amongst 5 of your most trusted friends (selecting them in such a way that it's unlikely they'll collude), and instruct them to only use their share of the secret when they've confirmed your death. 3 of them would have to "come together" (physically, or over a shared terminal or screen) and enter their "shares" to decrypt your recovery words. However, this would cause all 3 of them to know your recovery words.

To get around that, don't encrypt the recovery words themselves using ssss. Instead, encrypt the recovery words using a modern, strong, encryption algorithm, using a randomly generated key. Then use ssss to encrypt the randomly generated key, and share that.

Only give the ciphertext of the recovery words to the intended recipient upon death.

Instead of friends, you could also split the secret between your executor and the intended recipient/family remember, requiring consent from both.

Whatever you do, don't forget to write thorough instructions :)

1 comments

To add to this, you can instead use the multisig wallet and add your family members but in this case you are not splitting the private key amongst n members but you're creating n unique keys that's required to sign before the owners can complete a transaction. When someone dies in your family, you can remove that person from the wallet.