Spare me, I know all this. I have been exposed to Bitcoin for its entire life time. There is a specific reason I am choosing to handle things the way I am.
You posted this on a public forum and I had the democracy argument in mind so I posted. Not insinuating ignorance. Also interested in this initiative with onboarding/adoption in mind- seems strange to me that your family vault wallet will be "the only wallet" on your family's devices. Why not encourage them to take custody over other (smaller balance) wallets as well?
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Yeah my bad about that. Have some Sats for your trouble. The reason is even though that is the correct path, my family members are 1 password using (and sharing) type people. There just isn't a reality where they care enough to do this responsibly or reliably.
Even worse than this just being isolated to my family, this is not at all uncommon. It is the majority of people. I hope for change on that some day, but we do not live in a society that even allows for the thinking skills needed for that to happen in the first place.
The end goal being no one person with the main wallet phrase can take or spend anyone else's funds.
I have a good chunk of this worked out in my head if I were to develop my own wallet software but I wouldn't know the first thing or be able to do any of the math to do that.
I think though it is a matter of wallet UX. A Bitcoin seed phrase can have an additional passphrase called a two factor phrase. This can be anything you set it to.
The way I understand it is that the additional passphrase means you have a completely independent wallet because the hash or whatever that seed phrase + passphrase represents is different from just the seed phrase.
So that means you can have crazy scenarios like this:
Main wallet | |-sub wallet1 | | -sub wallet2 | | -sub wallet(2of3)
So you can have multiple "sub wallets" and have "sub wallets" that are also multisig. I don't know if the main wallet can be multisig or not and what the implications of that would be.
But each of those so-called sub wallets can have their own balance entirely unknown and undependable by anyone else who also has the passphrase of the main wallet. While this is typically used as an additional layer of personal security I think with enough ingenuity it could be used in some way to facilitate my goal.
The problem is there isn't really a reliable way to have some sort of global family balance. I guess to be even more clear what I am looking for isn't a savings solution for my family exactly. It is more of a family managed pool of money where participating members can collaborate in a democratic way about how the collective funds are spent.
Someone mentioned nunchuck so I am looking into that. I am really just trying to find ways to lessen the burden of self custody while still maintaining good enough security. Not an easy task but there are few collaborative solutions in Bitcoin. Inheritance solutions are worse.
I don't think this will be something I go through with because the more thought I put into it the harder it seems to pull off. I thought about setting the family up with multi sig stuff but that actually just adds to the complexity of things to track and keep secret as far as I can tell.
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One of the reasons I know Bitcoin is the future is the clear difference in online interactions in this community turning out positive when anywhere else they would devolve into insults or just end abruptly =) Let's see if my thinking would help you.
First: here is a presentation I was watching about multi-sig. I think it would make your goal possible but it does have the higher complexity. (or cost- everyone gets their own hardware wallet) Start at 2:48:25
However, like you said, maybe attempting multi-sig for extra security is not the explicit goal here.
How about a single hardware wallet > watch-only wallets (same public key) on each of your family's devices? https://bluewallet.io/watch-only/
-Hardware Wallet located in your possession / family safe / family trust. -BlueWallet app so your family can easily create their own other wallets + generate receiving addresses for the FamilyVault wallet and contribute to it.
This at least achieves the awareness/tracking and contribution for the Vault wallet by each user, but the multi-person approval feature would be offloaded to a physical process of taking possession of the master hardware device.
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Yeah it is hard to consider the person on the other end when we all strive to be so invisible.
I will look into this. I was thinking of some sort of way to have the hardware master vault on multi-sig, but each watch only wallet under the same master seed phrase + whatever private password phrase they choose and no multi sig.
If that could happen then I think most of what I want can happen. They could use the hardware wallet to access their vault under their passphrase to spend funds. The main family vault on the hardware wallet could not be spent by the individual but the balance should be viewable and xpubs exportable so all family members can still verify funds in the main vault are good.
The only missing piece of this would be the fact that all funds are separate and members would need to contribute to the main vault rather than the sum of everyone's balance be apart of it.
I definitely have a vision in my head on how to solve that last piece but there is no way I could do it on my own. It will require building a wallet from the ground up.
Ordered some hardware wallets to see if I can at least execute on everything else though.
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