This quote would be illuminating in other crypto discussions on this forum, highlighting a common misunderstanding.<p>> To me, the goal of crypto was never to remove the need for all trust. Rather, the goal of crypto is to give people access to cryptographic and economic building blocks that give people more choice in whom to trust, and furthermore allow people to build more constrained forms of trust: giving someone the power to do some things on your behalf without giving them the power to do everything.
Dark Crystal [0] is such a social key management system. It utilizes Shamir's secret sharing over a variety of distributed protocols (like scuttlebutt or briar) to allow you to break your secret (i.e. private key) up into "shards" and share them with your friends. Then when it's needed, you can retrieve it by having a subset of those friends submit their shard.<p>[0] <a href="https://darkcrystal.pw/" rel="nofollow">https://darkcrystal.pw/</a>
Am I understanding it correctly?<p>It's like a 'reset trade' button you can press and if most of your guardians approve, then they can reset your pubkey preventing the crypto from leaving your vault?<p>Sounds like a good idea, and could make people feel a lot more secure with their crypto. Definitely a tradeoff a lot of people would gladly take. You must admit it would be cool as hell to have a physical version of a key to turn simultaneously with your business partner to let your funds flow out somewhere.<p>This is my only real anxiety with the crypto I hold, and a good solution.
In his article, Vitalik claims Electrum’s cosigner model isn’t good enough, without mentioning it by name. Cosigner already provides configurable N of M multisig the countersigners of which are user selectable. These are likely to be major financial institutions in the long run. The cosigner model readily provides user-friendly, credit card style spending limits. It can put spending limits on your bitcoin, and it can get you your coins back if you lose your wallet. It does all this without forcing users to interact with “smart contracts”.<p>I have no choice but to conclude “social sharing” is the Rube Goldberg machine variant of Electrum’s cosigner model, and its primary function is to promote Ethereum.
I think institutions here could play a key role in the future.
There may will be many institutions offering this service somehow, competing with each other, and they will have to prove how trustworthy they are, maybe with algorithms or avoiding hacks/leakages.<p>Over time we would have some trustworthy new institutions where people could backup a piece of their key.<p>But I think it's a whole new set of problems, right?
What if banks end up playing this role? it would be funny haha.
The use of cryptocurrency for anything other than investments has been hindered the UX compared to the traditional financial system. But, how much additional effort would someone have to expend to maintain a list of guardians compared to maintaining an account in a traditional banking system?
What about wide adoption of "social recovery digital identities"? It should be possible to create an online identity that is vouched for by other users in the (decentralised) system. You could then tie your digital wallet to this, but also other less critical online assets like your Twitter account.<p>Most attacks against this system could be mitigated by having time-locks on the various assets which begin when the recovery process is started. In particular, if some of your friends are tricked into starting the recovery process, that should be published somewhere (in a pseudonymised form) so you can intervene and get them to stop before the time-lock opens.
Loss of bitcoin is the primary reason why Bitcoin will be outperforming gold in the long term. The supply is shrinking faster than gold. However that doesn't really explain the bubbles. If you can somehow implement effective recovery wallets the value of Bitcoin will rise much more slowly.
I am scared of hardware wallets as there is nothing to fix if it breaks. I want a backup system that is always recoverable.<p>Any ideas for a good strategy? Duplication on hardware level?
Funny, nobody has stolen any money from my bank account and it's not something I ever worry about.<p>Sounds like solving for problems created by other problems ...