So I’m using bit warden self hosted and now I’m freaking out about the very real possibility of my passwords getting stolen or lost in a fire. Having passwords on my phone makes no sense.
We need some sort of distributed password manager safety net. Like I keep your passwords safe if you keep mine. But how can I trust you? Can you trust me?
So your solution to password theft is to make sure other people have them?
End passwordlessness.
For a single password, it is indeed illogical to distribute it to others, in order to prevent it from being stolen and misused.
That said, the concept of distributing authority amongst others is quite sound. Instead of each owner having the whole secret, they only have a portion of it, and a majority of owners need to agree in order to combine their parts and use the secret. Rather than passwords, it’s typically used for cryptographically signing off on something’s authenticity (eg software updates), where it’s known as threshold signatures:
I remember learning about Shamir’s secret sharing, and indeed the concept is fascinating. I’m not sure passwords is the best use case of something like that, but I’m not against it in theory. On the other hand, I have thought about breaking my master passphrase into several parts (word 1 + word 2, word 2 + word 3, word 3 + word 4, etc.) and giving each two word segment to my siblings. If all my siblings minus one got together, say in the event of my death, they would have my full master passphrase to get into all the things I have protected behind it.