I dont understand all the faffing about keeping private personal stuff, private and secure.

I bought £75 in bitcoin in 2016 for my VPN, when we in the UK were still able to buy bitcoin from Bitcoin ATM's. I now have about £800 in bitcoin. I'm not bothered aout the the bitcoin

Until the government banned them. Its not funny when a government takes your freedoms away.

Anyway, back on topic.

all my bitcoin keys and other personal stuff, the stuff that my family will need when I die, is saved on encrypted USB drives. the password and instructions are kept with my will at the solicitors.

I encrypt my drives using openssl like this:

openssl passwd -6 -salt "salt password" "main password"

openssl passwd -6 -salt iloveHN iloveeveryoneinmyfamily

-6 = SHA512

$6$iloveHN$bbyV6w4JfwmXT6EJsKyd2NOT6mV4xTRU6rzHJplkofBOy3BapBB6gIGmyfniTReBnl30JjGi5nBPrpyoq7jWv.

not my password by the way;

I use that password to encrypt my drives with veracrypt.

I have a few of those kept at family members homes. if one gets lost there are others.

it is always a matter of trust for me. I simple do not trust other people to keep my private stuff safe.

We really appreciate you sharing your process — this kind of personal discipline and planning is impressive. What you’re doing with encrypted USBs and distributed storage is very much in the spirit of decentralization and self-reliance. This Being said, our project MindGTC Wallet aims to help the next wave of users — the ones who won’t go to such lengths, but still deserve protection. The reality is, most people don’t use tools like OpenSSL, and even fewer will maintain long-term physical backups. That’s where decentralized, automated recovery systems (like ones based on Shamir’s Secret Sharing + quantum-hardened encryption) come in — to bring strong self-custody without expecting expert-level behavior from the average person.(we do not have any access to anyone's keys or shards, its decentralized). In many ways, what we’re building is trying to preserve what you value — privacy, ownership, and trust — but in a way that scales to millions.

So it's one factor and everything is encrypted to your phone?

That’s a great question — and exactly the kind of skepticism that helps push the field forward. The short answer: No, it’s not just “everything encrypted to your phone.” We use Shamir’s Secret Sharing to split the private key into three pieces (shards). One is stored on your device. The other two are encrypted and stored across decentralized nodes (IPFS). You only need two of the three to recover your key.

We also wrap this with a system we call TKF (Temporal Key Forge) — it evolves the encryption over time and protects against brute-force or quantum attacks.

The user only needs to remember a strong password and have access to their email. We’re trying to make it effortless for non-technical users, while still keeping things non-custodial.