A New App with Dead Man’s Switch to Save your Bitcoin in an Unforeseen Event

There have been quite a few reports of Bitcoin being lost due to the death of the owner. Well, from the Bitcoin supply perspective it is a good thing as with a limited cap on its supply, the lost BTC even further shrinks the already limited supply leading to the rise in its value.

But for the relatives of the people to whom these Bitcoin belongs to, it’s a pretty grievous situation as the owner dies without passing the password of his crypto wallet.

However, not anymore, as a new application will now enable the user to pass off his/her Bitcoin in case an unforeseen event occurs.

FinalMessage Trying To Save Your BTC

Matt Odell and Murtaza Ali have launched this new application called FinalMessage. This new bitcoin project is encrypted with a “dead man’s switch” where a user can deploy any message that one wants to send to their chosen recipient if the user does not engage with the switch for a certain amount of time.

This switch uses Bitcoin payments as a trigger mechanism for the messages, that further leverages the lightning network to reduce the costs for processing the message. As per the Twitter description by Odell, a bitcoin payment of $50 extends the switch for a year while a smaller payment extends the switch proportionally based on the same rate, to ensure it is not triggered.

In case you don’t renew you switch FindMessage assumes the worst and send your message. But before going that route, it sends reminder emails to the user as the switch expiration nears.

The idea in focus here is that the user is able to send 1 of their 3 bitcoin multisignature keys to their chosen recipients in the event of an emergency. This is to ensure Bitcoins won’t be lost forever if anything happens to the owner, as the recipient will receive the third key to access the bitcoin.

While speaking to a media outlet, Odell shared the importance and use of multisig in projects like this,

“Storing bitcoin securely comes with a number of tradeoffs, tools like ours should help to reduce those tradeoffs, hopefully leading to broader use of multisig by the community.”

The messages are fully encrypted in the browser of the user before they are sent to the servers. By using a multisig key, FindMessage ensures that even if they are compromised and encryption is failed, your Bitcoin would still remain safe.

So, when you create your switch, you have to give the recipient the password you choose which they have to keep securely because the password will be needed to decrypt the message. In case the password gets lost, FindMessage can’t reset your password.