[yebyen]

> This is a very morbid thought, but

This is such a well-understood problem in fact that it has a name and Wikipedia entry, called "bus factor". According to:

> The "bus factor" is the minimum number of team members that have to suddenly disappear from a project before the project stalls due to lack of knowledgeable or competent personnel

As for proving that you own a domain, I think the DNS-01 challenge that is used to grant Star-certificates does a pretty good approximation, if you can create and update TXT records in the root zone, you have at least functionally "owned" a domain even if you don't legally own the domain.

[0xbadcafebee]

But this is vulnerable to a number of attacks that my solution isn't. Right now it's pretty damn easy to create valid certs for arbitrary domains. I'm constantly surprised that nobody wants to fix this.