A century ago, a commuter train carrying hundreds of passengers from Park Row to Brighton Beach, New York, took a perilous stretch of rail at seven times the appropriate speed.
At the controls was Edward Luciano, a young and inexperienced driver with only two hours of training, brought in as a substitute to cover a strike. As chronicled in Uptown, Downtown, a 1976 book by Stan Fischler, Luciano was defeated by the confusing braking system, and the train derailed on a jinking set of curves, killing at least 93 people and injuring hundreds more.
The wreck led to a raft of safety improvements, among them, it is believed, the dead man’s switch, a fail-safe now found in all kinds of modern machinery. A dead man’s switch can take the form of a handle or pedal to which force must be continuously applied, or a button that has to be pressed at intervals, but the principle is the same: If the human operator fails to respond, the machine shuts down.
In 2017, another New Yorker, Zach Hamilton, began to wonder how the same concept might be applied to the digital realm. He had identified a problem: People were getting locked out of their cryptocurrency wallets without any means of recovering access, and their heirs were finding it difficult to access their digital assets after they died. Billions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been lost this way. Hamilton figured that a digital dead man’s switch, which would release a document payload instead of switching off a machine, could help someone to recover their wallet or pass credentials to an inheritor without having to trust a third party. In theory, it could be used for all manner of other things, too. For years, a “quick and dirty” sketch sat dormant on Hamilton’s computer, he says. But when New York locked down for the Covid pandemic, he began to develop his idea. He called it Sarcophagus.
Hamilton was not the first to come up with a digital dead man’s switch. These kinds of services have been available for years from providers such as Stochastic Technologies. Firms including Google and Microsoft offer similar functionality, letting users nominate someone to inherit their account after a period of inactivity. The primary difference is that Sarcophagus is built atop crypto technology, meaning the contents of users’ documents are never visible to a third party and that the availability of their payloads does not depend on the service provider remaining in operation.
It works like this: A user submits a file via the Sarcophagus web app, specifies a recipient, and sets a timeframe. Then they agree to pay one or more fellow users to act as the file’s protector and post the fee in escrow. The file is encrypted and sequestered in a decentralized file storage network called Arweave, which aims to store information permanently by incentivizing people to contribute their own hard drive space. If the user fails to make an attestation proving they are alive within the timeframe, the file is released to the recipient and decrypted using a combination of their own credentials and those of the chosen protector. Only after the file has been successfully handed on does the protector receive the payment.
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