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tags: discussion
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# Social Recovery

Christoph Ono Jan 11th at 8:25 AM
Interesting argument for social recovery wallets: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html
30 replies

**Steve Lee** *2 months ago*
I’m a fan of exploring and innovating social recovery. Lots of challenges though. I skimmed the article but didn’t see the following addressed:
Are social recovery secrets stored offline or a mobile app? If offline, that is a big ask for each of your family/friends. And unless you routinely audit your family/friends how do you know they’ve not misplaced them? If mobile app, then there is risk of a widespread remote attack and loss of funds.
Unclear how much this would occur in practice, but what is to prevent denial of service/ransom when you ask someone to help replace your key? Sure you might’ve trusted that friends 5 years ago but times have changed.
That post mentions when you do that it should be a social expectation that each secret holder publicly declares they have a secret and then voila everything works out. I’m not sure about that…seems like a ripe opportunity for collusion vs. following the wishes / will of the deceased.

**Christoph Ono** *2 months ago*
I had similar thoughts. There’s a lot of complexity in the human dynamics and it’s also not trivial technically. But who knows, there might be many people for who this is more intuitive and practical than other solutions. Would you interesting to go through each of those points one by one and discuss.

**Christoph Ono** *2 months ago*
I am personally more comfortable with a multisig setup because very few people I know are familiar with bitcoin. Could be different in 5-10 years.
The only other real-world equivalent I can think of is that we deposited copies of our house keys with 2 separate friends. In case we’re not around, they can check on the house (check mail, water plants, etc.). We also have a copy of our neighbors keys who we barely know. Maybe some behaviors could emerge over time similar to this, but for our “money keys” and more high-tech?

**Daniel Nordh** *2 months ago*
These are essentially multi-sig wallets so the term 'social' is a bit of a red herring although you can add other people like friends and family.
I'm still not sure putting this responsibility on others is realistic at the moment.
The UX for Argent is better than most bitcoin multisigs though, and you could create a number of keys yourself instead of asking friends, and the company can hold one. (edited)

**Christoph Ono** *2 months ago*
Might be all multi-sig under the hood, but the user experience is hugely different.

**Daniel Nordh** *2 months ago*
Agree. And as this is all built in the application layer over a 'contract wallet' it should be possible on bitcoin as well.
I'm thinking that Taproot will make something like this easier.
One of the main issues at the moment, like the article says, is the costs. Simply adding a guardian (another key) would cost $10+ today.

**Steve Lee** *2 months ago*
Taproot definitely improves this

**Maggie Valentine** *2 months ago*
i did a user research project on social recovery when i was at celo this summer while we were looking into potential recovery schemes for the wallet (instead of the 24 word seed phrase they were using at the time). to echo what christoph said, social dynamics made it pretty unfavorable. users struggled a lot to pinpoint "good" guardians that they would trust, and the only ones who could confidently say who they would choose were married / in a serious partnership. others commonly said they would trust their parents as guardians, but obviously were wary about their ability to navigate the tech. makes it pretty hard to follow vitalik's suggestion of "it's recommended to choose a diverse collection of guardians from different social circles". in general, people were pretty uncomfortable with placing some responsibility on someone else.

**Maggie Valentine** *2 months ago*
i think it's a strong option to opt into (like how argent does it)

**Anant Tapadia** *2 months ago*
These are all valid points *@Steve Lee*. We think we have addressed some/ most of it using a mix of hybrid model social + self

**Anant Tapadia** *2 months ago*
Also using multi-sig means you are hampering the transaction process by needing multisig even for transacting, not just for recovery

**Anant Tapadia** *2 months ago*
Recovery and regular use of wallet for sending and receiving can be kept separate and it gives you more flexibility

**Steve Lee** *2 months ago*
Yes but that concept is separate from social recovery.

**Steve Lee** *2 months ago*
You can have multiple spending criteria without anything to do with social recovery.

**Anant Tapadia** *2 months ago*
We are still trying to improve the UX but on 18th we will present the next step in our backup scheme

**Steve Lee** *2 months ago*
And taproot makes multiple spending criteria efficient, private, and fungible.

**Anant Tapadia** *2 months ago*
and we would love to get your feedback. As promised this is the first group we will share this with

**Steve Lee** *2 months ago*
Super happy to see you advancing this!

**Anant Tapadia** *2 months ago*
A user can basically go from cloud backup to a stronger form of backup as they mature in their use of the wallet

**Anant Tapadia** *2 months ago*
I will prepare a deck and send some material in advance.

**Maggie Valentine** *2 months ago*
would love to see where you all are at @Anant Tapadia

**Anant Tapadia** *2 months ago*
Yes, we did take in some of your comments too @Maggie Valentine. Especially around the wording for F&F that when sharing Recovery Keys, you do not lose any privacy with your contacts

**Paulo Sacramento** *2 months ago*
Do you guys see any shortcomings for ZenGo’s approach? I love the idea of it being ‘keyless’.
https://zengo.com/safety/
ZenGo - Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency WalletZenGo - Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency Wallet
Account Safety | ZenGo - Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency Wallet
ZenGo is the first keyless bitcoin and cryptocurrency wallet — the most simple and secure way to manage your crypto assets. (12 kB)
https://zengo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/image-3.png

**Paulo Sacramento** *2 months ago*
‘The level of safety can be reinforced depending on how you set up and protect each one of your 3 factors. Keeping the 3 factors safe is critical, since losing access to any of the factors means you will not be able to restore your account.’

**Paulo Sacramento** *2 months ago*
Their approach is not properly social. But people can add someone else’s face as a backup face, so to say.
This is hands down my favorite approach, and Im trying to find out where it may fall short. (edited)

**Anant Tapadia** *2 months ago*
It is a good approach, few things:
Provide your email and face map to ZenGo (privacy??)
Not able to sign transactions without ZenGo server
Not bitcoin-only (distractions and scams)
Single points of failures as you have pointed out
Does not work without FaceID. So no plausible deniability.
Does not work if ZenGo does not exist.
(edited)

**Paulo Sacramento** *2 months ago*
Great points, *@Anant Tapadia.*
The face map is encrypted: https://zengo.com/biometrics-in-zengo-wallet/
6. They have a whole plan for this kind of situation: https://zengo.com/security/#chillstorage
Altcoins are really distracting… But this doesnt make the security model wrong by itself imo.
There are no single point of failures, as far as I understood. ‘Using threshold signatures, we’ve replaced the traditional private key with two independently created “mathematical secret shares.” One share is stored on your mobile device and the other on the ZenGo server. With no single point of failure, even if something happens to one of the shares, your assets are always safe.’
I dont think the users really care about plausible deniability, which is more suitable for users very worried about privacy.
ZenGo - Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency WalletZenGo - Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency Wallet
Biometrics in ZenGo Wallet | ZenGo - Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency Wallet
ZenGo is the first keyless bitcoin and cryptocurrency wallet — the most simple and secure way to manage your crypto assets.
May 10th, 2019 (19 kB)
>https://zengo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Biometrics-1024x341.jpg
ZenGo - Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency WalletZenGo - Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency Wallet
Security | ZenGo - Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency Wallet
ZenGo is the first keyless bitcoin and cryptocurrency wallet — the most simple and secure way to manage your crypto assets. (12 kB)
https://zengo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/image-3.png

**Anant Tapadia** *2 months ago*
Yes I see they have improved. Thanks

**Anant Tapadia** *2 months ago*
But some of the other points still remain IMHO - 3rd party dependency and privacy. Even censorship as they can connect your email to Face Map (?)

**Johns Beharry** *2 months ago*
Social Recovery describes a generalised technical solution. We already have a familiar mechanism that implements “social recovery” thats fairly widely adopted or known — which most people call inheritance.
There are also similarities in companies with partners. The problem is there is a trusted third party which enacts the distribution. Enter bitcoin… etc etc…
***Current State***
The main problem I see is that we have a short commitment time to the identities, bitcoin wallets, and user accounts we create — there is no long term planning as they are cheap to make so you can easily create a burner wallet, or PGP key and throw it away after use, or generate a new one if you lose it.

There is also a missing technological part — long term storage that’s cryptographically provable (think git commits hashes on bitcoin). Companies come and go — and their data centres with your information either gets corrupted and eventually wiped (see data decay).

***Implications of social recovery and burner wallets?***
Imagine each app having social recovery — You will annoy your friends and family every time you make a request for them to store some more data in a safe place. They won’t know what a safe place is, and if its in the cloud on one of their burner accounts, then you’ll be burnt. Certainly I won’t be writing it down on a piece of paper every time I get one of these request.

***A way forward***
We may own email accounts, twitter handles, or websites for many years but we have no idea what happens to these assets when we die. Even if we don’t care what happens after — what is the infrastructure for storing data in the long term? Social recovery cannot be applied in a meaningful form — long term unless this is addressed. (edited)

**Johns Beharry** *8:31 PM*
Some notes — this is why I’m of the view we have to start designing more banks vs wallets. Another example how this concept of slowing things down can be applied is for on-chain transactions which are becoming more expensive. I see nothing wrong with the app by default showing a lower fee that would allow my transaction to go through in a couple days.

If you want faster payments then lightning is available, and I can know to refill my channel on Wednesday so by Friday I’m able to go out with friends, and do my shopping at the market. (edited)

**Gus** *9:19 PM*
from a burner one time ---> To full fledged key with all your social assets attached

the thing is..

i tried to poke the community about this concept

and i dont know if it’s my twitter crowd or what it is, i got serious push back

here let share the thread with you

https://twitter.com/SifirApps/status/1291754258321346564

this is the whole thread

alot of sub threads in regards to points people bought across

**Johns**
From that thread
> “If i want to prove ownership i transfer those btc to a legacy address and use bitcoin-cli signmessage with the private key i want to prove ownership of.”

- This highlights the problem with bitcoin privacy and privacy ux in general. It's only accessible to folks who understand the tools "the power user". Some more empahy is needed.