A Very Simple Concept
You know that feeling when you’ve just arrived at work and can’t remember if you’ve left the oven turned on or if you’ve locked the door? Or when you have to pay for a shopping cart full of groceries, with no cash on you and realize you can’t quite remember your credit card PIN? And when you finally get home, you see you’ve forgotten to buy eggs… and you wanted an omelette so, so bad.
There’s a myriad of little things we have to remember each day and too many to count over the course of our lives. Is there a way to make things simpler for us? Sure, we can ask Siri or Cortana to remind us to buy eggs, but what about our passwords and private data? I wouldn’t trust those two “girls” with that kind of data. We need a safer solution for that!
The Dangers Of Losing Your Password
If you’re using a passcode to unlock your phone, chances are that you won’t forget it because over the course of a day you will use that code a number of times. Same with your credit card pin: if you’re mostly paying with plastic and using your card once or twice a day, that pin will be engrained in your memory. But things are a bit different with something we don’t use everyday, like our crypto wallets.
Believe it or not, the equivalent of millions of US Dollars has vanished due to lost passwords and private keys. Investment advisors often use the phrase “don’t invest more than you afford to lose” and while this is very sound advice, it usually refers to the underlying volatility of the asset you are investing in, not to the risk of losing it completely. Fiat currency can be stored in a bank, behind physical safety measures like thick walls, fire proof vaults and armed security officers. If by any chance all those measures fail, your money is insured so you will not lose it.
With cryptocurrency, things are totally different! You are in charge of your assets from a custodial perspective because you cannot send your crypto to a bank and you cannot insure it. This gives a new meaning to the phrase “don’t invest more than you afford to lose” because with crypto, you can actually lose it. All it takes is a forgotten password or private key. Unlike Fiat money, crypto currency is not handled or backed by a central authority/government and while this is part of its appeal, it could become a problem, mainly because you are in charge of safeguarding it.
What Are The Options Available Currently?
There are several ways in which you can store your crypto assets, however all of them require you to protect your passwords, private keys, keystore files and/or recovery seeds. Whether you keep your crypto in a hot, cold or hardware wallet, you are always responsible for protecting your access to it and considering the “unhackable” and decentralized state of the blockchain, a password cannot be retrieved the old-fashioned way by clicking a “Forgot my password” button.
There is one exception however: you can retrieve your lost password if you store your crypto assets at an exchange/brokerage, which is a tremendously bad idea by itself. Why? Because exchanges have a long history of being hacked. It’s actually a very common occurrence these days and if you keep up with the news, you will hear (or have heard) about a lot of hacks on exchanges. MtGox, Bitfinex, Coinrail are just a few examples but there are a lot more out there. The only advantage is that if you forget your password, you can ask the exchange to reset it for you. However, the risks outweigh this so-called advantage by a mile and storing crypto in a brokerage is shunned upon by the vast majority of crypto users.
This brings us back to the beginning: you have to protect your password and/or private keys. To do that, you can use a paid service like Keeper, Lastpass, Dashlane and others. This will set you back $1.50 to $29.99 per year, which let’s face it, is very affordable. Although these are not bad services, they suffer from the centralization problem, meaning they store data on company servers. Considering that hacks have affected some of the biggest firms and banks in recent history, it’s not that farfetched to fear such an attack on the very servers that store your passwords.
Other solutions for storing private data include offline laptops, hard drives, USB sticks and even writing the password/private key on a piece of paper. While these are not bad solutions, they are still prone to physical damage and are simply too rudimentary considering the day and age we are living in, with blockchain technology approaching mass adoption.
Why You Should Go For Infinitus
Built on the ERC-20 protocol, the Infinitus (INF) dApp makes full use of blockchain technology by storing your passwords, private keys, keystore files, mnemonic phrases and recovery seeds on a decentralized peer to peer network. It also eliminates the need for a password because the dApp automatically detects inactivity and sends the private data to a person designated by you once the inactivity period is complete.
For example if you lose/forget the password and you don’t have access to the Infinitus dApp anymore, you don’t have to worry because when the inactivity period is up, the smart contract is activated and the data is sent to a person previously designated by you (your wife, family, yourself, etc.)
If your phone gets lost, stolen or breaks down, your private data is not compromised because it is not stored on that phone. If our servers get hacked, that’s irrelevant for your data because it is not located on our servers and instead it is scattered in tiny bits across the peer to peer network, thus eliminating single point failure risks.
As you can see, there’s not much that can happen to your data other than return in your possession. Infinitus takes care of that even if your phone is gone, if you forget your password or if our servers get hacked. It’s a straightforward and simple solution that finally lets you use the “unhackable” and decentralized condition of the blockchain to your advantage, without having to be a blockchain expert.
