Paperback: A Digital Will and Backup System for the Reasonably Paranoid
summary
Paperback is a paper-first digital-will and backup system that actually implements Shamir Secret Sharing to split a ChaCha20-Poly1305 encrypted payload, signs documents and shards with a detachable signing key, and stores data as scan-friendly QR codes plus zbase32/text fallbacks. It supports quorum expansion (mint new shards from an existing threshold), uses BLAKE2b-256 checksums and GF(2^32) arithmetic, currently works as a CLI producing PDFs and recoveries (~8–9 KB secret limit), and needs GUI, crypto review and multi-page/compression work.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:40Digital Assets and Wills
- 5:19Digital Assets and Backups
- 9:04The Gist
- 13:12A Few Words of Warning
- 18:20Main Document: Header
- 18:58Main Document: Document
- 19:21Main Document: Checksum
- 19:39Key Shard: Header
- 20:29Key Shard: Shard
- 21:53Key Shard: Checksum
- 24:04Recovering the Polynomial
- 25:41Additional Features
- 28:10Current Status
- 28:43Next Steps
- 32:06Open Problems
- 35:56Paper Storage








