bus factor = 1 (why i coded a kill switch for my death)
Source: Dev.to
Why I built a dead‑man’s switch
I’m a developer who builds redundant systems for a living—load balancers, failovers, backups for the backups. We spend 40 hours a week making sure a SaaS app has 99.9 % uptime.
Last Tuesday, sitting in my apartment in Mendoza, I realized my own “uptime” is fragile as hell. If I walk outside and get hit by a bus (the literal bus factor), my entire digital life is bricked. Zero. Gone.
I have cold storage, SSH keys to servers, and a 24‑word seed written on paper in a drawer. What happens if I die? My family might find a piece of paper with random words, assume it’s trash, and throw away generational wealth. Or they might hire a lawyer who doesn’t know what a ledger is.
“Not your keys, not your coins” is a cool slogan—until you realize that when you die, “not your pulse, not your coins.” It terrified me, so I opened Vim and fixed it.
How Deadhand works
I built Deadhand, a messy but functional Python open‑source dead‑man’s switch. The logic is deliberately simple because simple things don’t break:
- Every 30 days it emails me: “Hey, you alive?”
- I click a link, and the timer resets.
- If I don’t click, it waits.
- If I still don’t click after subsequent intervals (day 60, day 90, …), it assumes I’m dead or incapacitated.
- It executes the payload, sending encrypted shards, keys, and instructions to my beneficiary—no lawyers, no probate court, just code executing a contract.
Open source and trust
I made it open source because you’d be an idiot to trust a closed‑source app with something this critical. You need to see the code to trust it, and you can self‑host it if you’re paranoid (like me).
I didn’t build this to launch a unicorn startup; I built it because I couldn’t sleep. If you hold crypto, manage servers, or have secrets you want passed down, stop pretending you’re immortal. Fix your bus factor.
Get the code
The repository is here:
Star it, fork it, audit it—don’t let your keys die with you.
— max