Hamilton said the system is designed to be “vulnerable,” meaning it does not depend on the goodwill of any party to achieve its goals. No one but the sender and recipient can access the contents of the file. All other parties are economically incentivized to cooperate, and redundancy ensures that the payload is always available. “Small sets of data control our lives,” says Hamilton. He added that humans are “sticky,” meaning unreliable and fallible, so encryption is the only sensible way to protect these strings.
Hamilton says there are many other ways Sarcophagus can be applied outside of cryptographic settings. A digital dead man's switch could be used by whistleblowers to publish incriminating material or by dissidents and journalists who suspect threats to their lives as a form of SOS. In a more everyday context, it might be used to pass account credentials from one generation of employees to the next.
Illustration: Alberto Miranda
Sarcophagus has received $6 million in funding to date from investors including Placeholder, Blockchange, and Hinge Capital. This project is managed by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). The DAO is a collective that manages Sarcophagus' finances and development process through a community voting system. The sarcophagus' current state can best be described as “early beta,” Hamilton said. Although the service is operational, it is not widely used and does not generate much revenue, only earning a small amount of money with each payment.
One barrier to wider adoption is that the recipient must already have access to a crypto wallet whose credentials will be used to decrypt the data payload. There's also the option of creating a PDF for someone that explains the process for creating a new wallet and accessing it, but some crypto literacy certainly helps.
As the generation accustomed to cryptocurrencies ages and begins to think more seriously about the possibility of their own mortality, Hamilton believes a larger demographic will begin to see the need for services like Sarcophagus. . “Millennials are just starting to think about this issue,” he says. Hamilton imagines more accessible services will also be built on top of Sarcophagus technology. These products, which Hamilton calls “boomer products,” are being developed by Hamilton's own team and are designed to abstract away some of the technical complexity and use cryptographic infrastructure. This is to prevent them from noticing. (However, there is an unavoidable tradeoff between security and convenience.)
Either way, the current system in which credentials to high-value cryptocurrency wallets are kept in bank vaults protected by armed guards is bordering on absurdity, Hamilton said. The “billion dollar filing cabinet” should be abolished, Hamilton says. “We still rely on heavy metal doors and men with guns, even though the codes themselves can act as walls of incredibly thick steel.”
This article was originally published in the May/June 2024 issue of WIRED UK.
