LAW 2No infrastructure can release your memory — not while you live, and not when you're gone. Inheritance without a backdoor.read the laws →
ECHO LEGACY · v0.1

Passing memory on, without a backdoor.

The second half of "nobody owns your memory but you" — so what happens when you're gone? Legacy lets you pass a chosen subset of your memory to people you trust, and does it without ever giving a company, a server, or anyone but your heirs the power to open it. Inheritance is where memory products quietly install a backdoor. Here is how to do it without one.

The subset you choose to pass on — the rest dies with you
  • legacyFor my familyThe principle outlives the founder. Keep it free.
  • legacyThe password to the workshopIt was never about the lock.

How it works — no backdoor anywhere

  1. 1

    You choose the subset

    Mark what passes on; the rest dies with you. Both are ownership — what you keep private forever is as much your choice as what you leave behind.

  2. 2

    The subset is sealed

    Encrypted under a legacy key only you hold (AES-256-GCM). The sealed blob is opaque ciphertext — a relay storing it learns nothing.

  3. 3

    The legacy key is Shamir-split

    GF(256) Shamir among N heirs, threshold K. Below K the key is mathematically unrecoverable — not partially, at all. Only K heirs together can rebuild it.

  4. 4

    A signed heartbeat says 'still here'

    Only your key can produce it; a relay can neither forge it nor fake its absence. The heartbeat log is public, signed timestamps — it reveals nothing about your memory.

  5. 5

    Heirs verify the lapse themselves

    Once heartbeats lapse past the threshold, heirs verify the condition from the signed log — no server decides — combine their shares, recover the key, and open exactly the subset you left.

No infrastructure can release it (Law 2). The relay would hold only heartbeats it can't forge and shares it never sees — heirs hold those. You stay sovereign while alive: every heartbeat resets the clock, and you can re-split, change heirs, or change the subset anytime. It reuses the same sealed-box crypto as the Relay and the Shamir scheme cousined with the Recovery Circle.

⚠

Honest sharp edges

A social lock, not a cryptographic time-lock

K heirs could collude to open it early. The defense is human: choose trustworthy heirs and a sensible K. A true time-lock (drand beacons, time-lock puzzles) that makes early opening impossible rather than dishonorable is the harder upgrade — deferred and named, not pretended.

Absence ≠ death

A lapsed heartbeat means the heartbeats stopped — which a lost key looks identical to. A production system needs a grace period, multiple warnings, and a clear way for a living owner to reappear and halt release before it triggers.

Heir key management

A share is only as safe as the heir holding it. Lost shares erode the threshold; compromised heirs erode the secret. The same key-custody reality as the Recovery Circle.

Interplay with recovery

Legacy and the Recovery Circle are cousins — both Shamir over the same field. Keep their share-sets and thresholds distinct so a recovery event can't be mistaken for, or trigger, a legacy release.

Legacy is the principle finishing its own sentence. You owned your memory in life; you decide what of it survives you, and you hand the keys to people, not to a platform. The server that couldn't read you while you lived still can't read you when you're gone — and that is the point.