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Hide My Email, SimpleLogin, and similar forwarding services give every account a unique private alias. They also create a hidden inheritance problem — your family can't recover any account whose recovery email goes to an alias they don't know exists.

I launched Killswitch with a bug bounty program because a security product seems obligated to have one. I shut it down three months later. Here's what a solo founder learns from running one in 2026.

How the Social Security Death Master File works, why banks, the IRS, and credit bureaus all find out at different speeds, and why the gap between death and notification is the most exploited window in American identity fraud.

Beneficiaries don't all need the same thing. Your lawyer needs your will — your sister might just need to know the lawyer got it. Killswitch v1.5 introduces witnesses: notify-only beneficiaries who receive an audit-trail email showing what was transferred (and, if you choose, to whom) without ever gaining file access.

A plain-English walkthrough of Shamir's Secret Sharing — the polynomial trick, where it works in production, and the brutal failure modes that make it the wrong tool for most family inheritance plans.

From Westinghouse's 1872 train brake to the Soviet Dead Hand system to WikiLeaks insurance files to modern crypto inheritance — the long, strange history of the switch that fires when you stop showing up.

James Howells threw the wrong hard drive in a landfill. Stefan Thomas has two password attempts left on $250M of Bitcoin. Matthew Mellon died on $1B of XRP nobody could find. A look at the most expensive mistakes in cryptocurrency — and the simple precautions that would have prevented every one.

If you've ever designed a distributed system, you already know how to do digital estate planning. The vocabulary is the same — single point of failure, failover, RTO, audit log — and the question is the same: what happens to a critical node when it goes down? You just haven't applied the framework to yourself yet.

Every account you own is only as secure as its recovery flow. "Forgot password" is, by design, a feature that lets someone who isn't you take over your account if they can convince the system they're you. A look at why recovery is the real security perimeter — and what better recovery would look like.

The threat model, the wrapped master key architecture, the per-file content keys, the per-share keys, and the trigger pipeline — a transparent walkthrough of Killswitch's original zero-knowledge design, preserved as history. We retired this architecture in 2026.