Notes on cold storage, threshold cryptography, and the long tail of keeping secrets safe.
When Matthew Mellon died unexpectedly in April 2018, roughly $193 million of his $200 million estate was locked in XRP that he had taken unusual care to secure. He kept the keys in cold wallets distributed across bank vaults in different cities, registered under aliases only he could identify. Nobody else knew where…
Stefan Thomas has 7,002 Bitcoin sitting on an IronKey he can no longer open. He used eight of the device's ten password attempts; the remaining two are likely the only ones he will ever get, because IronKey wipes the drive on the eleventh. At the time of writing the wallet is worth roughly $700M.
In 2022, Terence Eden published a short essay titled I've locked myself out of my digital life. It described a hypothetical cascade: lightning strikes his house, destroying his phone and his fire-proof safe. His password manager needs a 2FA code from the phone. His TOTP backups live in cloud storage that requires the…
The DNS Security Extensions root key, which signs the cryptographic chain of trust for the entire global Domain Name System, is protected by an arrangement that looks, from a distance, like an elaborate piece of theatre. A small group of cryptographic officers gathers four times a year at one of two secure facilities,…