Oddbean

If you haven't had a look at SEEDXOR, definitely do. It allows you to take an existing key and turn it into 2, 3, 4, 10 if you want. You just generate 9 new keys (for 10, just to be extra here) and combine them, and then combine them with the real key. That will give you the 11th key and you can safely discard of the real key and geo disperse the 10 keys. Okay, don't do 10 remaining keys.

Heard of it but haven’t looked into it yet, will suss it out. As far as geographically distributed while eliminating single point of failure & capture, for me 4 locations is a good number. When going above that, say creating additional redundancies, it seems to me the chances of something going wrong increase… ppl / places you trust that much, will they remain there long or be moving soon, can you access without too much trouble or is encrypted/ coded comms required to discuss something, when a bull market pushes price up so much do you feel the need to ask them to check if it’s still there & or let them know the spot at their place you’ve hidden it, has the place / person attack vector for theft increased to a point of actually being less secure etc etc For me 4 spots w/ the smallest possible circle of ppl who know those spots is the sweet spot. And single sig being much easier & less error prone compared to multi sig when considering inheritance planning & who might be restoring 24 words into a hww is the real game changer for multi vs single. The one thing multi sig offers over single sig, as far as additional practical security, is it allows you to spread out your trust in the hww manufacturers security trade-offs chips etc, eg cold card & a Jade in the set up. Wondering if SEEDXOR adds any additional practical security to that single sig set up?

Yeah, multisig offers the ability to spread trust across multiple hww, but conversely, it kind of mandates it too. If you are gonna use a single device, with MAYBE the exception of seed signers. If you were gonna do it all on one device, then what's the pojnt of it? You're bringing the keys into one place, and even if not, you're bringing the keys onto one device. The main benefit to seedxor for me is that you never lose entropy, or better said, the entropy is only ever as low as the lowest entropy key. As an example, if I have a random key and xor it wjth 11111.... then if you find the random key, then you are way more than half way there. Conversely if all keys are properly generated, then even if you have 2 of 3 of the 128bit keys, you still are 0% of the way to finding the final answer. Get me? Like if you have a 256bit 24 word phrase, and split it into 2, 12, and I find the first 12 words, I'm half way there. I only need to brute force 128bits. If you have 3 128 bit keys, and you find 1 of them, you have nothing, you still need to brute 128 bits... if you find 2 of 3, same, brute 128 bits. If you had 0, brute 128 bits. Plus each key is valid, checksum and all. So you never even have any clue how many parts there are.

Yeah ok I got ya. I find the functionality of say the cold card q practically the same level of security for entropy, for me anyways. Dice rolling your own hex then relying on the device to convert that & add on its own additional layer of entropy on top to get to the 24 words. I can see the attraction though for additional methods / devices / security trade offs in generating separate seeds. Good entropy should be a given in any set up. I guess in comparing the single sig vs multi sig set up I should have stipulated the entropy better