In the physical world, losing your private key can be significant risk. To mitigate this, it's a good idea to store your private key in multiple physical locations, creating redundancy. However, this approach introduces a new set of challenges. The more physical locations you use, the higher the risk that one of your backup keys could be compromised (stolen).
While storing your key in a safer location like a bank safe is also an option, even a bank safe isn't entirely foolproof and in most cases you can not access it at any time. It is also worth mentioning that yearly cost for having a bank safe might also not be insignificant.
To further enhance security, you can split your private key into multiple splits and store each split in a separate location. Whoever wants to access to your wallet needs to be able to access all locations.
Similar idea is followed by Shamir's Secret Sharing alghorithm (SSS) and multi-signature transactions, however both strategies are not very practicalas you will need to visit multiple locations in order to access your funds. This might not be easy in scenarios which includes natural disasters or wars.
Can this be simplified?
Instead of relying solely on physical storage for your private key, you can consider storing one split virtually (in the cloud). With partial virtual storage you will simplify accessibility significantly without drastically compromising security.
DecLegacy specializes in securely storing the virtual split of your key using advanced cryptography & logical layers. DecLegacy is designed to be reliable and redundant by design, ensuring that you can recover your secret even without direct access to DecLegacy.
You can create 2 non-equal splits. First split should contain 7/8 of the private key. Second split should contain 1/8 of the private key.
First split should be stored physically in 1st location. For the sake of minimal redundancy you need to store copy of this split at 2nd location.
Second split should be physically stored at 3rd location (ideally it should not be easily accessible)
Redundancy for second split will be achieved via virtual layer and DecLegacy. Storing split at 3rd physical location might not be needed but we still recommend it in case of network unavailability or due to forgetting or loosing your encryption key.
Such a setup will not only drastically simplify and speedup access to your funds. It will also make sure that access to your funds is safely transferred to your loved ones in case of accidental death or other unexpected events.
DecLegacy never even send unencrypted secret or encryption password to our servers or to the internet. Despite these security measures, there's always a risk that your computer could be already a target of cyberattack or malicious software. Let's assume, for the sake of caution, that anything you type on your computer could potentially be exposed to an attacker.
A Bitcoin private key is typically represented as a 64-character hexadecimal string. Brute-forcing a Bitcoin private key by attempting every possible combination is currently infeasible due to the vast number of potential keys. To put this into perspective, a brute-force attack would take approximately 3.7×10⁵⁹ years, which is far longer than the age of the universe (estimated at around 10¹⁰ years).
We recommend splitting your private key into two non-equal splits. You can store 7/8 of the key (56 characters) physically and the remaining 1/8 of the key (8 out of 64 characters) virtually.
How would such a strategy affect a brute-force attack?
If an attacker manages to obtain the virtual part (8 characters), the time required for a brute-force attack would still be around 8.5×10⁵⁰ years.
If the attacker gains access to the physical part (56 characters), the brute-force attack would take about 583 years. Within that timeframe, it’s very likely that you (or your loved ones) would have moved your funds to another address.
