Listening to Marty’s TFTC Podcast he had NVK on to discuss the state of bitcoin, AI and Coinkite’s new product
Why Arca?:Why Arca?:
don't lose your secrets.don't lose your secrets.
A dead phone. A missing recovery code. One founder. One parent. One office. Secrets must survive across places, across people, and over time. arca is for the stuff that shouldn't depend on one person, one app, or one building.
What is Arca?What is Arca?
arca is a physical digital safe for the secrets you do not want floating around your life. Seed words, recovery codes, passwords, emergency notes, business keys, signing material, and encrypted files get a dedicated box with hardware custody, sync rules, and recovery rules.
How does inheritance readiness work?How does inheritance readiness work?
Do not make family decode your digital life under stress. arca is meant to let selected material become recoverable by the right people under defined conditions. Not everything to everyone; the right packet to the right person.
The site does a good job explaining why Arca box is different than your Umbrel or Start9 box
| Umbrel | Running a personal server and self-hosted apps at home. | It overlaps around personal control, local box, sovereignty vibes. arca is not mainly an app server; it is a dedicated safe for critical secrets and recovery material.Not a home server. A safe. |
| Start9 | Sovereign personal server and self-hosted services. | It overlaps around physical appliance, self-hosting, Bitcoin-adjacent audience. arca should not be framed as a general compute platform; resilience and controlled recovery are the center.A Start9 runs services; arca protects the access paths. |
This looks like a really cool product for those looking for self sovereign data hosting solutions.
NVK can be an ass and he dunks on SN but his company makes good products. I am curious how much they will charge for this.
I've seen him posting about it, but haven't bothered looking into it much, so I'm glad you did!
I don't think I would use something like this. Seems to me that if you need data kept over a long time, cloud is better. But if you need data kept secret, physical copies are better.
Keeping data on a physical device seems like you are asking for the data to be lost. Wouldn't it make more sense to store encrypted data somewhere on a cloud service and just make sure your family has access to the password?
(I suppose if quantum cracks elliptic curve encryption, you all of a sudden have a pretty big problem, though).
It sounds like part of the product will be some kind of synchronization process. Like you buy multiple of these devices; one for your igloo in Canada, your villa in France, your "permanent residence" in Puerto Rico, and citadel in El Salvador. Then the data you add to one gets replicated to all the others.
He should just go whole hog and do multi-jurisdictional RAID. I could be tempted by a plug n play version of that.
rich people problems
Yes! This is how NVK explained it
In the pod NVK mentions how we are losing the internet war. If the government is in your threat model then the cloud providers will fork over your most important secrets and data.
With this box you can some what mitigate against that plus the boxes can be linked via Tor and have a web browser interface.
as I've thought with umbrel and start9, the device in my house most similar to these is a router. I'm surprised they don't market the thing as a plug-n-play kind of router that also does (fill in your blank). But perhaps the more technical folks will explain why this is disastrously dangerous.