Anonymous Dead Man's Switch
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Hey HN, I'm John from Alcazar. We just launched a Dead Man’s Switch that uses anonymous accounts instead of email+password.I'm a fan of Mullvad and their approach to accounts, so I copied it. But instead of 16 digits (53 bits of entropy), we generate 12 random words from the Monero wordlist (128 bits) and derive the account identifier+"password" using libsodium.The app is built on top of our existing Flare code and infrastructure. It uses SvelteKit, Shadcn, Tailwind CSS on the frontend, and FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Celery on the backend. It’s hosted on Hetzner and uses Scaleway for sending email.I’d appreciate any feedback (positive or negative) on the product. I’ll be in the comments responding to questions.Website: https://alcazarsec.com/deadmanswitchSignup (quick & anonymous): https://switch.alcazarsec.com/signup
HN · launched Feb 25, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 89%) · 0 views
Niche: privacy and censorship circumvention tools · 94 launches, 7 in the last 7 days ▼ -50% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Workflow automation
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 94 launches in privacy and censorship circumvention tools →
Could you build this?
Yes This is a CRUD application with scheduled background jobs for email/Telegram reminders and client-side or server-side standard encryption, using a standard BIP-39 or Monero-style mnemonic for account recovery.
Discussion
6 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Telegram, Signal
Concerns raised: Distinguishing death from temporary absence without knowing user details, Non-technical recipients struggle with delivery experience, Plaintext delivery after decryption reduces security, Anonymous signup limits ability to verify user status reliably
Feature requests: Better delivery UX for non-technical recipients, Improved protocol for dead/busy verification without compromising anonymity
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 84 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #81 of 85 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 103 days after the earliest competitor.
- Cipherwill · ph · 2026-11-02 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Ghostly Chat · ph · 2026-11-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Anonymous Swap · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Bored People Chat · hn · 2026-06-30 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Death Plan Switch, a self-hosted dead man's switch for solo devs · hn · 2026-10-20 · 110 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- USDPSWAP · ph · 2026-10-13 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Flux, a tiny protocol that rethinks email from the ground up · hn · 2026-03-08 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- 吐槽墙 · ph · 2026-10-25 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.37
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