The Loom

Every key has a 3.3% chance of being lost each year.

That number comes from three independent hazards — the seed (device failure, bricked hardware), the person (death, incapacity, forgetting), and the place (fire, flood). Each starts near 1.1% a year; together they add up to ~3.3% per key. The faders below the screen let you change each one.

The Loom runs thousands of independent multisigs. For each, every key faces those odds month by month for ten years, and a lost key is never replaced. When fewer than M keys remain, the quorum can no longer sign and that multisig is lost. The big number is simply the share that made it to year ten; the staircases are the individual runs, the right panel is how the share settles as runs accumulate.

It’s the same model as the research paper, just live: more keys protect you from loss only if the threshold leaves room to lose some.