> Scuttlebutt (decentralized social network / protocol) has a tool specifically for this. It's called Dark Crystal. the basic summary is that your secreted gets securely divided among your friends. none of them can read it, but if you get enough of them to send their "shards" back to you you can rebuild the "crystal" and recover your secret.

> The web site isn't great but... https://darkcrystal.pw/

> and here, of course, is the Scuttlebutt site: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

Sounds like a variant of Shamir's Secret Sharing [1]. Here are some other variants of secret sharing mentioned [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing

It was mentioned in the post:

> without simply using a centralized service like Coinbase or needing secret shares from k of n friends.

Yup, jrpt already mentioned it. This is called Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme. There is a handy CLI tool implementing it: http://point-at-infinity.org/ssss/ This is what's Satoshi's treasure hunt uses (have to find 400 of 1000(?) keys to win the 1 million USD prize)

Yep, installable on pretty much any Linux machine

  dnf (or apt) install ssss

> Dark Crystal

Is there any white paper or something similar?