Eight pieces seems too few to me. It's too easy for gov't agencies to "lean on" eight individuals or organizations (someone else suggested "watchdog" groups as fragment holding agencies, but that doesn't seem very good. Groups can change over time, respond to pressure. Putting a lot of fragments in a few hands seems fairly fundamentally flawed). I'd rather see thousands.
The point here is that if the evil government wants to go busting in on your conversations without a warrant, it can't. Even if they cheated and looked in the escrow for the names of you secret holders, they'd have to show them a warrant. The government couldn't try pressuring that many people before one of them blabbed and that would lose those folks doing the pressuring their jobs and quite probably result in prison time and political ramifications. I still don't like the idea of escrows because it assumes that I have something to hide, but if you have to do an escrow, I thing eight people is fine. JWS