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Comment by aasasd | Hacker News Reader

I was lowkey thinking about approaches to a similar arrangement, and my conclusion is that the key to this is a lawyer/attorney, unless you want to make the trusted person a part of a convoluted cryptography scheme. Give the person an encrypted file with instructions, or a password database, and have the attorney deliver a piece of paper with the password to that file if you're incapacitated. Perhaps make the paper look innocuous to the lawyer if you want. IDK though if lawyers actually do things like this in various jurisdictions—outside of the rather final scenario of a will.

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> have the attorney deliver a piece of paper with the password to that file if you're incapacitated.

I think this is the difficult step. How does an attorney know whether you are incapacitated? Do they video-call you every day, and check that you aren't under duress or being deepfaked? Do they check government records of deaths every year?

It would seem that any system with a reasonable cost and reasonable latency will have to involve software at some stage, so saying "get an attorney" really means "don't trust software you've written yourself, get an attorney to write it instead".

(Okay, the attorney would pay someone else to write the software they use, but in any case, suggesting reliance on an attorney leaves unanswered the technically interesting part of the question, and doesn't really allow us to speculate about what role would actually be left to the attorney).

> How does an attorney know whether you are incapacitated?

You realize that the system to deal with this already exists? It's called the legal system, and it hooks into various specialized professions, including medical ones. As in, the partner brings the lawyer some papers from doctors that say you're out of commission, and the lawyer executes whatever procedure you prescribed for such a case. The same way as when you're dead, just without the death part (hopefully).

(Cue HNers saying that the papers can be forged, etc.—if that's the worry, one has more immediate problems in their relationship than the arrangement of a ‘dead man switch’.)

Sometimes I have to wonder if a bunch of hackers from ~2000s decided to live entirely in computer systems, and forgot that the ‘hacker ethos’ pertains also to researching and using existing systems.

Fortunately I've never had to try procuring legally-verifiable paperwork from a doctor to prove that a loved one is too sick to tell me their password, but I have to admit that such a process probably does exist, and someone could navigate their way through it during an emotional difficult time. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.

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