Bitcoin Forum

I have a client who has passed away.  His Bitcoin investment was $10,000.  How do I liquidate his account for his surviving family?

You cant. There is no account, either the person left notes how to recover the BTC (passwords, how to operate the wallet they used) or they are lost forever.

Make sure nobody sells or reformats his computer{s}

This is one of the many hiccups and flaws that Bitcoin has and many are unwilling to admit. Another example is that someone non tech savvy can actually lose that amount in a second if they do a simple mistake or forgot a password. If Bitcoin wants to move forward it will need to be more user friendly, offer refunds and make things much more simple for the common user.

bitcoin will never work as a centralized payment unless people are willing to store their coins on something like coinbase in the future, with fully insurance and everything that fiat as and basically you can just go ahead and use fiat at that point

you must be responsible of your funds with bitcoin, i know that many don't want this and this si partially the reason for the slow adoption

That depends on the specifics of how he stored his bitcoins and what access he left for you.

Was it stored in an account with a service such as Coinbase?
Was it stored on a computer in a wallet, and if so do you know which software he used?
Was it stored as a private key written on a piece of paper?
Did he use any password based encryption?
How did you come to know about the bitcoins?
Do you already have access to the bitcoins and are just asking how to convert it to local currency?

You are welcome to send me a private message if you wish to discuss this privately.

This is such a complicated question regarding you trying to liquidate this asset. Here are a few things to consider from a financial and legal perspective.
1. Do you have access to the Bitcoins ?
 - Whether you can access the "wallet" that contains the bitcoins is the determinant of whether you can liquify the assets or not

If you cannot gain access to the wallet or able to access the coins
 - you will never be able to liquify these coins, it is basically just sitting money you can't never access.



If you can gain access of the wallet
- You need understand
*When you acquired the bitcoin
*The price you acquired the bitcoin for
*The current price of Bitcoin
*The income of individual
 - Capital gains taxes varies from 15-20% depending on income bracket.

Bitcoin is taxed as property, so you will have to pay capital gains tax if the value of the bitcoins increased.
- It seems this individual has been holding on these coins for quite a while, so there is no way getting around paying taxes
- The value of those coins could be worth more then $10,000
- If you have a specific number of coins, that would be better information.

As far as I remember there was a father who lost his son, claimed passed away son's bitcoins with the help of this forum.
You need to give us more details about bitcoin storage so we can help you.

Simple, give the private key(s) to the surviving family.  :)

Well that's just how people now trust banks instead of hiding their cash under the mattress if you ask me. The problem is that Coinbase and services like this should be insured and regulated, Bitcoin so far is a long way from that and I'm not sure if that would ever happen.

I agree that Bitcoin needs much improvement in terms of user friendliness. This will take us a few more years imo.
But regarding refunds people have to learn that Bitcoin is not a bank, remember no central authority.
Therefore everybody is himself responsible to safe and protect his coins.
If you don't or can't do that, then go with Coinbase. But please then do not complain about their crazy KYC/AML and obstrusive questions where and from which person you got your coins from for instance.

As people already wrote before, there is no way to get access to the Bitcoins when the owner did not leave the password or private keys. This is why i printed my private keys and put a short introduction on it (and how valuble this stuff is or could be in the furture ;)) if i should pass away suddenly.

I agree refunds are harder to implement than other improvements. And perhaps it's not really needed if Bitcoin is actually adopted by big companies and has the same regulations as regular currency. I'm not very familiar with all Bitcoin wallets but maybe there could be a time limit to "undo" a transaction if you don't mind waiting a little bit. Kinda like Gmail "undo" feature, hehe.

Well actually a private key would be enough to recover lost coins. Best that he would leave notes, but many people don't. So search for private key.
Good luck.

You need the private key to access his funds...

That is the only thing about bitcoin, it's hard to claim it if youre not the owner for things like this!

As the others said, you'd need to provide more details to get any advice.

How do you actually know he owned $10,000 in bitcoins?

ps. Do not post private key to anyone who offers you an advice. If you're not sure what the private key is - do not send any long streak of numbers/digits. You could send public bitcoin address, but I don't think anyone will necessarily need it to help you out.

ps2. Do not try to steal BTC from the family, if you're not familiar with Bitcoin, you'll be easily traced. Just saying.

This. Only correct answer. If he was stupid enough to invest $10k in bitcoin WITHOUT backing up his private keys or making some kind of arrangements for situations like this then you're shit out of luck. But again, it's not bitcoins fault - it's the users. It's like stashing cash somewhere and never telling anyone else where they are.

If you can access his private key then you can help his family for surviving.

Otherwise you can't do anything.

If he didnt write password down - this coins are lost forever.

Your coins are likely to be lost forever if you dont have the private key...

Some people laugh but safety deposit box store paper wallet or seeds honestly makes a lot of sense.   You get a bank level security protected from the element's.   

And if something bad happens like someone passing away it is in something a family member should get in will.  I'm sad to hear about OP best chance is finding the place where the person stored the paper wallet, or seeds since sounds like not safety deposit box.  Hopefully you know the person good enough to know hiding spots.

More coins lost = better BTC price in future.

this statement it's true until a certain limit, because otherwise, everyone of us should have destroyed almost all his coin to ensure that the price will increase again

i say that holding is better than destroying, in both case they are not available to the market, but with holding you can "retrieve them" at some point

This is probably not a joke we are kidding upon...
It's actually a flaw if someone passes away and the coins are irrecoverable...
The person should have stored them in paper wallets and should have locked them somewhere in the home itself, so that the family might have got that much advantage in gaining possession to those coins (if there was not password)...