Show HN: Live Man Switch

While the idea is commendable, this is exactly the kind of information and trust I would not hand to any kind of an unknown third party. Luckily in most countries you don't have to! It isn't widely advertised, but many countries that offer digital citizen's services also offer filing for a will as a digital service. The details vary a lot country to country, but if you're considering something of this kind, I would strongly urge you to look into that first. Failing that, filing a will on paper is straightforward too, albeit not free. To put it another way, countries have handled wills for a very long time and personally I don't have a reason to doubt their competence much in this regard. An unknown third party on the other hand may leak your data or return 404 without notice.

I had some philosophical thoughts on what if scenarios through the technical prism. Assets such as property,money in the bank,or stocks are pretty easy to sort out after death,but what about anything on the tech side? Many of us have Github accounts, encrypted files, all sorts of services with 2FA, etc. Imagine if you are a solo dev running a small,yet successful and revenue generating service and something happens to you. Would your family be able to login to AWS or get Docker to do its work and etc?

For some time I was thinking about what would happen with my crypto if something happens to me. I don't have much crypto, but still, I would not like for it to get lost if something happens to me. There are a lot of stories of lost crypto, and about 1/5 or 1/6 of all the Bitcoins is already lost because keys to the wallets were lost. That is A LOT of money lost.

Because of its decentralised nature and of how wallets are accessed, most of us keep wallet keys very private and they would be lost if we forget them or die or aliens abducts us or something else happens to us

I wanted to build a solution for that for myself but later decided to make it as a very simple service and make it available for everyone. So this service is called Live man switch. It is a digital version of dead man switches used to shutdown various critical devices if operator drops dead in the real world (think of a train operator dying and train stopping).

You define how often should service checkin on you (via email or sms), trigger condition (for example you did not checkin for 30 days), and messages (emails/webhooks) to be sent if trigger condition is met. So in case that you fall in the black hole, disintegrate, corona pwns you or you die in any other old fashioned way, you can pass on messages to your loved ones including explanations on how to access your crypto or any other digital assets and accounts you own. And of course I implemented crypto payments for the service.

You can check it out here https://livemanswitch.com

This service has many other use-cases. It can be used by terminally ill patients or anyone in general as a digital will, by elderly people so that their family can know that they are alright (by checking in), for enforcing habit forming etc.

p.s. If you deicide to check it out: NEVER EVER UPLOAD YOUR WALLET SEED OR ANY OTHER PLAIN PASSWORD AS IS to my service or any other online service. You can do it more securely in several ways: Use a cryptographic mechanism, encrypt the seed/password or any other credentials or private message with a cryptographic algorithm like PGP or AES, send the cryptographic keys to your contact in advance so he would be able to decrypt the message, and upload encrypted text to Live man switch. Store the seed/password somewhere safe offline and in livemanswitch explain to you contact how to access it Store part of the message offline and other part you can send with Live man switch, and you can combine this method with other cryptographic mechanisms etc... And again please, data is stored securely, but you should never ever trust a stranger online, and never show very important credentials in plaintext online.