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Comment by ghostfoxgod | Hacker News Reader

It's an incredible technique, when I came across it, it just changed the way I thought of solving giving out keys without "truly" giving them out. This gave me confidence for eternalvault.app, a project of mine.

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I’ve been noodling over this exact business idea for a couple years! Part of my value prop was to make ops scale down to as close to zero as possible by having the encrypted data and most of the front end for accessing it live in S3 objects (or some similar mega-cheap object store). Aside from that, all you need is the dead man’s switch mechanism. And the secret fragments would live on QR codes that bring you to the static SPA with one of the fragments already loaded up, prompting you to scan more to complete the decryption.

Good work doing it. I guess now I don’t have to. :D You may have gained a customer from this HN thread.

Indeed, that's precisely why I decided to ditch out of the subscription model and went into one time payment method, did the math and it made sense that I don't need a very heavy system apart from supporting the dead man switch trigger

Wrote my thoughts about that here: https://eternalvault.app/blog/why-we-are-adding-lifetime-pri...

And it feels good to know that there are people out thinking about this, makes me happy truly and if you want to try out the platform, welcome aboard, happy to walk through it if needed. :)

That’s great, and exactly what I was thinking. In fact, you have to wrestle with the fact that if it’s too cheap, people won’t trust it.

One thing I had been thinking about was that it’s important to be extremely open about the algorithms and infrastructure required, with a very transparent whitepaper on how it works (enthusiast level discussion of the technical details) and how you have designed the company to be extremely sustainable. I think your job is to convince people of two things: 1) this actually respects my privacy in a way I can verify myself (or lean on the technical expertise of other outside observers), 2) this company actually has a chance of surviving until I die.

If I can see those two things are true, a $199 lifetime purchase is a no-brainer (and that probably covers a dozen lifetime members’ operational costs). :D

Honestly those are 100% fair questions, for (1), I have a security page: https://eternalvault.app/security/ but mainly because of marketing purposes, most people I have as customers are in their 30-40s and not fairly technical, so when they ask me, I have to be mindful to not bombard them with too much technical info, but it's a good idea to still have a whitepaper with more detailed info for someone who actually wants to confirm on the privacy aspects.

Regarding (2), that is the most common question I get and honestly I don't know if I have the best answer for it, but here's what I have, I have two vaults for myself (of course I use Eternal Vault myself), one for family and one for business, in the business vault I have few documents including one called "Business continuity plan" which lays down all of my raw thoughts around how eternal vault is built, core technical things, infrastructure, dooms day trigger etc, and other business specific documents, right now since I don't have any heir, I have added few close people to it who are also fairly technical to keep it running, but eventually my idea is to expand on it in such a way that if I'm removed from the equation, the product can still sustain itself both business and ops wise, but I can totally understand why someone would trust a stranger on the internet, so I'm actually not sure how can I make the answer for 2nd much better, what do you recommend?

Well one idea I had that changes the operational posture somewhat is to have the “reader” UX be a static page served completely from S3 and referencing other static S3 resources (the encrypted blob), then have the dead man’s switch “fail open” if the “user is not dead yet” signal goes offline. That way the company could almost run out of money and cease active operations but still have the data be readable by end users (with the keys, of course) for a long time. Having such a fallback plan in place gives confidence.

The other thing is being very transparent about the real world incremental cost of a user’s data. It slightly undermines the price point, but being able to say “look, incremental storage cost for your data over your lifetime is 33 cents. We have a bond that covers our current user base in perpetuity ten times over” is pretty compelling. You can say “yes, you’re paying way more than the incremental cost, but you’re paying for the care that went into making sure it’s got longevity.”

I can’t stress enough how happy I am for you that you built this thing that I consider a fabulous idea. I have an idea about how you can market it if you want to hear it. Let me know the best way to email you.

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