Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has publicly favored multi-signature over Shamir backup, saying the latter is “much easier to fail” for ordinary users.
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Peter Watts, founder of NFT marketplace Reservoir, took to 19 pandemic.
The conversation took a new turn when Vitalik Buterin joined in, calling for the use of multi-sig (also known as multisig) solutions to secure personal funds. Buterin did not reject the idea of cold wallets, but highlighted security decentralization, preferring multi-signature setups where multiple keys are required for transactions, stressing the importance of security in cryptocurrencies.
He stressed the need for an “M-of-N” configuration, where some keys are kept by the user and others by trusted individuals, without revealing their identities even to each other.
In response to Buterin's suggestion, Ethereum investor Toby Kitty-Shamir proposed a fallback method for splitting encryption keys or passwords into multiple parts called “shares.” While acknowledging the benefits of Shamir, Buterin warned that it is “much easier to fail” than multisig, because it relies on carefully handling and storing many parts of the secret. If any of these parts are lost or handled incorrectly, it may be impossible to put the secret back together again.
