That’s a great question — and exactly the kind of skepticism that helps push the field forward.
The short answer: No, it’s not just “everything encrypted to your phone.” We use Shamir’s Secret Sharing to split the private key into three pieces (shards). One is stored on your device. The other two are encrypted and stored across decentralized nodes (IPFS). You only need two of the three to recover your key.
We also wrap this with a system we call TKF (Temporal Key Forge) — it evolves the encryption over time and protects against brute-force or quantum attacks.
The user only needs to remember a strong password and have access to their email. We’re trying to make it effortless for non-technical users, while still keeping things non-custodial.
We really appreciate you sharing your process — this kind of personal discipline and planning is impressive. What you’re doing with encrypted USBs and distributed storage is very much in the spirit of decentralization and self-reliance.
This Being said, our project MindGTC Wallet aims to help the next wave of users — the ones who won’t go to such lengths, but still deserve protection. The reality is, most people don’t use tools like OpenSSL, and even fewer will maintain long-term physical backups. That’s where decentralized, automated recovery systems (like ones based on Shamir’s Secret Sharing + quantum-hardened encryption) come in — to bring strong self-custody without expecting expert-level behavior from the average person.(we do not have any access to anyone's keys or shards, its decentralized).
In many ways, what we’re building is trying to preserve what you value — privacy, ownership, and trust — but in a way that scales to millions.
We also wrap this with a system we call TKF (Temporal Key Forge) — it evolves the encryption over time and protects against brute-force or quantum attacks.
The user only needs to remember a strong password and have access to their email. We’re trying to make it effortless for non-technical users, while still keeping things non-custodial.