Morning coffee, Winklevoss twins and Leonovus 3.0
Most mornings when I get up one of the first things I do is make myself a cup of coffee and start reading the online journals, which usually includes The New York Times. This morning as I flipped through the articles in The Times, one caught my eye “How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune”:
The virtual currency stockpile that Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss began amassing in 2012 is now worth around $1.65 billion. They have no plans to sell.
Working in the technology arena, this heading caught my eye and I proceeded to read the article. About two-thirds of the way through the article, where the author is discussing the Winklevoss’ investments, specifically Bitcoin, is the following couple of paragraphs:
“Every Bitcoin sits in an address that can be accessed only with the corresponding password, or private key. The problem with this system is that anyone who gets hold of a private key can easily take the Bitcoin. And unlike money was taken from a bank account, stolen Bitcoin are essentially impossible to retrieve. A number of virtual currency exchanges and wallets have collectively lost billions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin to thieves.
The Winklevosses came up with an elaborate system to store and secure their own private keys. They cut up printouts of their private keys into pieces and then distributed them in envelopes to safe deposit boxes around the country, so if one envelope were stolen the thief would not have the entire key.”
I immediately was stopped in my tracks… what the twins are manually doing to protect their ‘data’ aka private keys, is PRECISELY what Leonovus 3.0 does digitally with an even higher level of security. Think about this, what happens if the Winklvosses have chosen a safety deposit box in a building which becomes severely damaged, or one or more of the envelopes doesn’t make it to the safety deposit box because of a vehicular accident?
I don’t know where they put the envelopes, but instead of mailing physical envelopes what if they could have digitized the private keys, ‘cut up’ the digitized private key into say 25 pieces and sent these ‘pieces’ anywhere they wanted to in the entire world AND when they decided to break the digitized private keys up into 25 pieces they specified that they ONLY NEEDED say 16 pieces to reconstitute their private keys and only THEY were authorized to reconstitute their private key. And all of this took just a couple of clicks on a keyboard. The security level is increased exponentially, the time to execute is reduced to seconds, and any other sensitive data can easily follow the same process.
What the Winklevosses Twins are doing manually to protect their highly sensitive data, is very astute. The opportunity for them and others with similar sensitive and valuable data is the understanding that what is a powerful manual process, has been developed into an automated and more secure solution and can easily scale to petabyte-sized data if needed. It’s called Leonovus (Click here to learn how we encrypt, shred, and spread your data)
