[theamk]

It looks like "reserve requirement" is at most 100% -- so if Archeologist misbehaves, they only lose a small multiple of the contract fees? This seems pretty crazy even you fully buy into rational actors model.

Here is a simple hypothetical:

Let's say me + my partner have a DeFi startup, and we have $1,000,000 worth of cryptocurrency in cold storage, protected by multisig. In order to prevent money from being lost if something happens, I want my partner to get a key if I die. A regular centralized safety deposit box is $100/year, but I don't trust it, so I set up this "sarcophagus" thing with $10,000 as bounty, to incentivize the archeologist nodes.

Assume that my partner is not actually trustworthy, and they want to steal the money. So they contact Archeologists nodes directly, and offer them 10% of "corpse" value if they unwrap early.

What would a rational economic actor do? From my reading the paper, it would be in their interest to _defect_ and unwrap earlier. They are going to lose their bond ($10,000 + 10%) and their reserve requirement will raise a bit -- but not too much if they don't do this frequently. And they will gain 10% of corpse value, or $100,000 in this example.

So it looks like this scheme is really not useful for any sort of high-value secrets?

[qqii]

From reading the litepaper I have the same understanding.

It's even worse becuase if you were in contact with the nodes directly you could simulate unwrapping on a fork - here they would not suffer any economic consequences.

On the other hand there's no guarentee your partner can contact any of the node owners. The protocol doesn't provide a mechanism, nor does ethereum so it only takes 1 to not respond.

[22c]

Yes, honestly, you should assume that the recipient is also an archaeologist.

If you do not trust the recipient to act with your best interests at heart, do not use this service. I think that should probably be explained better in the documentation.

[theamk]

But if I trust the recipient, why would I need this service? Just send the email and ask not to open until I die.

[22c]

Do you also trust that the recipient will keep their emails secure?

Edit: Moreover, if we assume that there could be a bad actor that wants to know your secret, you have now endangered that 3rd party by giving them your secret.

Again, another scenario: You might trust that 3rd party now, but not in a years time (when, hopefully, you're still alive). Well, the good news is, you never revealed your secret to that 3rd party and you have no obligation to continue making them the recipient of your secret.

[theamk]

> You might trust that 3rd party now, but not in a years time (when, hopefully, you're still alive)

Then you don't want blockchain-based technology. Remember, the data is still on the chain, and can never be deleted - the paper is pretty clear about it.

So in a year's time if the 3rd party contacts the archeologist, they can arrange to truncate the chain and unseal the key. Yes, the archeologist is not going to get paid on-chain by the protocol, but the secret is still out.

Really looks like the bank's safe deposit is a much better solution if your data is valuable.

[22c]

I still think you might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater; though I admit there's a lot more bathwater than baby, especially when compared with first glance.

[22c]

The problem with your scenario is that the recipient of the payload is not trustworthy.

Instead of the recipient being your partner, it should be a trusted 3rd party who could be instructed to provide the key to your partner in the event of your death (it would then be up to that 3rd party to verify that you are in fact dead). You could also add all kinds of caveats here like the 3rd party should only provide the key to your partner if your death wasn't suspicious etc.

Essentially, the recipient of the key needs to be trusted. Hopefully someone who cares about YOUR legacy, not lining their pockets with whatever the contents of your sarcophagus might reveal.

You can't assume everyone is a bad actor, otherwise everyone would be murdering their parents :)

[theamk]

But if there is a trusted 3rd party, why would I need that whole sarcophagus system? Let's just cut out the extra step and give the key to 3rd party directly. May buy that safe deposit box at the bank, it is pretty cheap.

The whole premise of decentralized system is there is no need for trusted third parties.

[pcthrowaway]

Disclaimer: I haven't read any the technical details of how this works.

In decentralized systems, shouldn't nodes suffer repercussions for dishonest behaviour which outweigh the potential gain? Which could mean (complete conjecture here) the archaeologist node would no longer be able to participate in the network, and would stand to lose out on more money that way.

I have no idea if the sarcophagus protocol/network actually provide the correct measures to ensure nodes can't be incentivized to do this. I would hope so though, it's like 'decentralized network 101'