What happens when the building the CA is in burns down?

The CA is in a gpg-encryped secrets store (pass) and has a password on itself, so it can be backupped like normal data to an off-site location.

Scan printed QR codes of your private key that you had backed up off-site.

Ideally, k-of-n key shards, stored in safety deposit boxes.

That's actually pretty brilliant.

Provided you keep said papers away from prying cameras in a verifiable way, that is.

For more inspiration, check out the Glacier Protocol.

https://glacierprotocol.org/

Thanks for the heads up!

I wish I'd thought about this when playing with bitcoin a few months after launch and amassing an integer value larger than zero. That wallet died with the hard drive.

Please tell me you still have the hard drive. There’s a chance for recovery, and I have some experience in this area if you want some tips. Step 0 is always keep your drives for future recovery attempts.

It was dumped many, many years ago while BTC was still a novelty paying for pizza in the thousands BTC per. I went to see if I still had a backup of the wallet with a USD:BTC spike a few years back and it was gone.

Life goes on, even when sad things happen :(

Think of it this way: by starving the supply of that one bitcoin, you have contributed in some small way to the eventual loss of all bitcoins through similar events - speeding up the rate at which the world can move on from this silly fad.

ddrescue may be of interest if you still have the disk.

That's `dd` for broken disks. It keeps a log of data it couldn't read, and can keep trying to read it indefinitely, it even supports a save state and can resume trying again later.

I've recovered filesystems from several failed disks using it. It's not fast though!

The extreme version of this is using an HSM, and putting one in a safe deposit box.

It's not so extreme, you have to trust the HSM manufacturer.

Try generating randomness using casino-grade dice, and xor-ing it with the HSM. Maybe then.

Now I'm wondering who's managed to pull off supply chain attacks on dice, since I'm sure it's happened already.

Also, this doesn’t apply to most real scenarios (especially not “how I run my personal stuff” type scenarios), but is a fun one to contemplate: what happens when your customer has requirements that specify all keys (including root signing keys) to be rotated at a certain point in the future? Having a process for this is an interesting challenge.

The CA is a key, not a network service.