I have been thinking a lot lately about key management and fund recovery. It occurred to me that we could create a system that allows us to recover funds from lost keys by signing time bound transactions which can sweep our funds in the event that we lose access.
In a nutshell, this works by signing a transaction that deploys a contract which sends funds to another address (this could be a friend, family member or even your exchange) and setting time constraints such as not valid before and/or not valid after. You can also sign many of these transactions with multiple nonce values so that you still have a valid transaction in the event that you make future transactions.
Since this signed transaction is constrained to the recipient and certain time criteria, it is not sensitive and can be stored anywhere, including on the cloud. As a user you have the power to invalidate the transactions at anytime by either spending the funds or using up all the nonces.
I have started creating a prototype here: https://github.com/James-Sangalli/eth-timelocked-backup, let me know what you think of the concept and how you would improve it.
Merry Christmas!
