Self destruction + dead man switch

Somehow connect your vital signs to the system and have it check every so often? Throwing some impossible ideas out. Could decide for the time not logged in to be a certain number of months, based on preference, too, as the most simple solution. It’s a long wait, but is a trade-off.

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Sounds great, but…
If you go nuts or lose internet access, your wallet contents would be sent to someone probably more clueless about this these than you. In all likelihood they’ll either lose their password, or become an easy target.

Since MaidSafe isn’t out yet, I’ll make a Bitcoin example: write down your wallet pass phrase (or private keys for your addresses), seal it in an envelope and attach it in your will (to be opened by designated whoever).

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But the context was an already risk averse situation so there is nothing clueless about it, and it is another way to produce transparency and limit coercion. There have been movies about this, was “the Firm” about this?

It would be possible with wereable authentication gadgets like Nymi ( https://www.nymi.com/ ) which checks heartbeat uniqueness as a biometric template.

To make it failure safe, something as simple as creating a probabilistic analysis based on your routinary logins throughout a period of time, say a month, you could set up your smart contract to be triggered once your logoff period goes to 6 sigma.

The envelope can be stolen.
Better option is to create a multisig address between a lawyer, your family and your closest friends.

And if Nymi goes titsup while I’m old and senile, the coins remain there without anyone knowing.

Until a method gains wide acceptance and proves successful in practice, there’s nothing that beats real estate or gold in safe jurisdictions.

Of course. But IMO it is more likely that Bitcoin (or my lawyer) won’t be around 30 years from now than that my will would be stolen.

Of course y’all are forgetting one important detail about this conversation. Electronic money depends on electricity. What if the power goes out? What then? I say while crypto is good and having all these backups are great, nothing beats hard copy when the power goes out. Is there any way to print your multi sig, safecoin wallet, or assorted smart contracts? Or god forbid does the safe network take snail mail? Oh my god what a concept. (Actually that is a concept worth considering. A SAFE post office. You send paper mail in one end, it get scanned, encrypted, emailed and printed out the other then auto enveloped and someone gets paid in safecoin to deliver it.)

Yes. But if all the power is out, it won’t do you much good I think. Honestly, if all the power is out, we have bigger worries than mere money.

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At this point your paper wallet is useless and guns and ammo are the new currency.

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Solar powered batter backed up moblie SAFE mesh.

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True. Also food and water and other such essentials.

That would also be good. :smile:

I know planning for the power to go out seems extreme but considering the fact it does happen (and in parts of the world it happens quite regularly) it’s something to consider.

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Temporary localised power outages are not a problem. The network would only be harmed/destroyed by a very large and almost indefinite power out - think nuclear war / collapse of world wide infrastructure.

It is not worth saving Safecoin in this situation!

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Those thinking about a powerless world are picturing doomsday scenarios similar to a nuclear holocaust or a zombie attack.
You can have sporadic blackouts for an hour or a day, but it is unrealistic to think about the whole civilization without electricity forever.

That would imply that human ingenuity is dead and all electric technology is destroyed (not just failed on a glitch) and we lost all capacity at fixing problems. Utterly unrealistic.

But let’s play the scenario where suddenly we lost our mastery of the electrons.
Beyond electronic currency, without electricity we have whole infrastructures paralyzed, our food preservation is destroyed, industrial batches of medicine spoiled, planes can’t even work, telecommunications are dead.
Markets can’t operate, exchanges doesn’t work, you can’t even access your bank account and reach your “real money” because the database is unreachable. The economy as a whole is in the worst depression in the history of the human kind.

Yes, a world without electricity is a doomsday scenario that is unrealistic, as unrealistic as a nuclear apocalypse.
Yes, again, you can have sporadic blackouts but it will be localized. The system as a whole will still be alive, you can charge your phone and your laptop from your neighbor or use your solar panel at your house, or a portable solar charger, or from your car battery.

How would Nymi go tits up?
I will translate what I was proposing.
The proof of life wouldn’t be based on a continuous stream of active session, that wouldn’t be resilient against failures (ie. the bracelet battery is drained).

The proof of life would be based on the number of logins you make on average throughout a number of days or months. From that average, you can reasonably predict that if your rate of logins are way lower than you average, then you are probably dead.

This gives you enough breathing space for the sporadic malfunctions you may have with the device. You may even spend a whole month without login in.

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But you can still get stuck in a country where some dictator power sneaks up and goes pol pot on people. He did drive them into the stone age over night.

Back in 2010.: how would MtGox go tits up?

And also, assuming one wouldn’t do this for less than $10K (it appears a Nymi devices costs around $100, and who knows if there’s a monthly “service” fee, I guess there is?), for $10K in crypto I’d have to spend about 1% a year and for what? I would still own uninsured and volatile crypto and Nymi could go titsup.

At the same time for less than 1% a year I can store precious metals at a specialized warehouse in Switzerland.

Your approach can work, but I don’t find it attractive. To me it makes sense to convert excess crypto to something else (e.g. CHF cash parked in Swiss) and for the rest (say, less than $5K equivalent) use a simple method.

Perhaps it wouldn’t threaten safecoin but it would prevent one from USING one’s safecoin. That’s my point. Honestly dude have you never spent any time out in the bush or even in a rural area, or even a smaller community. Hell even large cities lose power. Even if my house has it’s own power so my computer runs if the network doesn’t have independent power then I can’t connnect to it. What I’m saying is if we set up a mesh network of safe routers each router should be set up with it’s own generator. What I’m saying is it’s not enough just to say we have decentralized internet. We need to get off grid.

Actually I wasn’t thinking that but you really think a global blackout couldn’t happen and it would be unrealistic? Yeah people could solve problems but switch off the grids and all that’s left is independent power. And that’s all it would take. For some entity (government hmmm? Or maybe some corporation) to switch off the grid. You seem to be forgetting the goal of Agenda 21 or the fact the U.S. has been prepping for civil war for quite some time now. Also you must remember that while renewables are taking off still a substantial amount of power is still generated using fossil fuels and those are running out. And you are forgetting that switching off one’s power is a very effective way to subdue an individual should they start rebelling against the government, be their home or a whole neighbourhood. Grid power = control. Same with water, same with food.

@Blindsite2k

Perhaps it wouldn’t threaten safecoin but it would prevent one from USING one’s safecoin. That’s my point. Honestly dude have you never spent any time out in the bush or even in a rural area, or even a smaller community.

This is a different issue, soluble locally.

BTW I’ve experienced all of the scenarios you mention and live off-grid.

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I mentioned this sort of thing to the team a while ago so I know they are aware this functionality will be in demand. We need flexibility in access control precisely because you probably don’t want to take data with you.

Programmable privacy is the answer. Lists of trusted peers who will receive your vault or any files you select when something goes wrong. Or you can set it up so there is a democratic process where your list of trusted peers can vote to release whatever is in your vault to whomever (revocable privacy).

Select your peers wisely though.

Revocable privacy probably isn’t the best name for it’s purposes but that is what the research paper that invented the concept called it. Programmable privacy or access control scripts/ privacy smart contracts would be better.

The point is it’s not really all that useful to give a person some private key and all their data is to be protected by that one person. That isn’t really much more secure than the current situation and not very useful for anything truly important.

On the other hand if you can script the access control right or program things right you can have a democratic process determine who gets access to what, you can have attributes determine who gets access to what, you can have an arbitrator control, or you can pre-define a list of people in advance.

The point is there has to be some smart contract templates for all different kinds of scenarios otherwise SAFE Network is going to get bad press when people lose their data in hacks, or when their data gets destroyed because something happened to them. In the end you have to protect the data beyond the brain of the person protecting the key or the data isn’t safe.

This requires fine tuned access control policies rather than mere “secrecy” and “anonymity”.

Then they need to release that smart contract support along with some templates prior to 1.0. SAFE Network will not be useful to most people if people cannot control their data in creative ways. So for example if you get kidnapped then you should still be in control of your data.

And it should also be possible for you to give a group the ability to release your data if the group watching over you thinks something is wrong. So peer control of data can be very important.

Smart contracts would make everything possible. Hopefully SAFE Network supports easy to use scripting languages for these smart contracts so we can thinker.