Bitcoin Forum

Many keep their bitcoins so secure that only they can access them, without anticipating that they might one day die and take their bitcoins with them.

What are your plans for your coins after you die? How do you plan to make them (un)recoverable?

Put whatever it takes into your last will and testament, nothing new so far.

Armory has (or will have soon) an awesome feature built into the paper backup system that allows an M of N recovery. Fully customize-able.
I plan to print 10 sheets of paper that each have a piece of the puzzle to recover my cold storage wallet. It will require 7 pieces of the original 10 to recover the wallet.
6 of them get distributed to family and friends with instructions to hold onto them until I die.
4 of them are to be in the will itself, this way, the other 6 can never do anything before I actually die (not that I couldn't trust those people).

That's a neat idea.
It could be used with all your important logins.  Maybe another use for your wallet?

  I am sure that someone will come to a solution like that the coins that have been dormant for 3 years or so, can be mined again, or distributed somehow. Not sure, just a thought

I was wondering about this myself. I am in Afghanistan and have to consider these things.

Funny you mention this. I just emailed an encrypted copy of my wallet.dat to my family members. I encrypted it with a truecrypt container protected by an enormous password thats composed of a lot of things only my family members would all know, or be able to find out, like old phone numbers, old car license plates, my "social security number", bank account number and other stuff. I wrote the explanation how to create the password in a text document I attached with the mail. So should something happen to me, they should be able puzzle together the password of the truecrypt container, which contains the wallet.dat plus a text file with the bitcoin wallet password.

Im sure there are better ways to go about, but this was good enough for me. Its possible for them to recover my coins, and damn near impossible for a random hacker.

Terrible idea, what if my life savings coins are dormant for for 30 years because I'm saving them?
If some coins disappear forever, the other ones get more valuable. Plus, coins are divisible into 100,000,000 units each. There are plenty of coins in circulation, they do not need to be re-mined.

The OP makes a good point. I think I need a plan. Ya never know, my stash might be very valuable someday. It would be a shame to have it lost with my brain.

Commit my Private keys to memory and when I reincarnate I can claim them.  :-)

What if 1 btc will value 1000$, just add your coins to your testament.
I think that will make your children happpy :)
Jokin'  :D

It was just an idea, as I said I dont know too much of behind the scenes things

Seems pretty complicated.

Wouldn't it be easier to create a RAR archive containing the wallet with enough repair/recovery data, and give only part of the data to your family ?

With proper balancement of amount of recovery data, the same thing could be achieved.

Is it true that if you die while in the service, the military will return your dog tags to your loved ones? Perhaps you could get a private key engraved onto a dog tag and carry it with you, and let your family know how to use it in the event of your death. Does the military even do dog tags anymore?

I just put some instructions along with the encryption passwords for my (many) wallet files in my safe deposit box.  My family knows there is enough value there to have incentive figure out what these instructions mean.

I'm getting close to wanting to sell one wallet so I need to go back to the safe deposit box to get the pass-phrase.  At that time I'll adjust the instructions to make sure the fam only gives one wallet at a time to a professional to open up if they choose to re-coup the value that way (it being mildly complex since I use OpenSSL in native form for encryption.)  I thought of this failure mode only recently.

I have money in account that have not had any activity in the past 3 years. 3 years isn't long, I would be pissed if they were to revert back into mineable bitcoins.

I am not in the service. They did give me dog tags the last time I came out here but not this time.

Perhaps engraving the cross around my neck could work. And if someone stole it from me I could immediately rush to a computer and move my BTC.

Though out here I would probably die from a missile or mortar round...

I once considered creating a service which would provide time-locks. Request a public key and at some time in the future the corresponding private key would be made public. Encrypt what you want and leave it wherever public you want. Of course, you have to do some management to re-encrypt things if you're using it as a dead-man's switch but the principle is sound.

After a little consideration though, I decided that the risk from those who wanted private keys released ahead of time just wouldn't be worth it.

You are correct, this is more complicated than necessary (for most). But for me, it will provide a little more piece of mind. As they say, to each his own, and the OP asked about how we planned for this event. This is how I am planning.

If enough time goes by any solution that involves hardware might be so obsolete that a museum would have to get involved to read the data. If i gave you five inch floppy i bet many here would be like wtf is that. Just thinking out loud.

All of you have complete overthought this! It is a difficult problem indeed with a clear solution.

I'm pleased to enlighten you all that big S himself put in the solution for us all to use, in a rare and often-overlooked feature of Bitcoin called nLockTime.

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5783/transactions-with-a-wait-time-using-nlocktime

What do you do?

1] Take your wallet ("wallet A"), and make a wallet for your heir(s) ("wallet B").

2] A has all your N coins, B has 0 coins.

3] Sign a transaction sending all your coins from A to B (or maybe 100 transactions with N/100 coins to 100 B address, whatever, you get the idea: you are giving your money away). Use nLockTime for the block occurring ~1 year from now. You keep your coins (for now) despite broadcasting these transactions.

4] NEXT YEAR: When that block rolls around, if you are still alive move all of your coins to a new wallet ('A prime' or whatever), and redo step 3 with transactions for NEXT year. The transactions you originally wrote in 3 will all expire and do nothing. (Dont forget to do this or your heirs will collect early)!

5] Eventually you die, and your heirs wait for the transaction to ultimately go through. Maximum possible wait time: one year in this case, but potentially anything you want.

There are dog tag creators at some Walmarts and pet stores, can also order them online. Though putting a private key in the clear would be asking for it to be swept if archives are kept of what was put on the dog tags. If you order them one at a time from separate sources instead of as a pair at once, you can split the key.

You could also split the key on tats. One tat by one artist just above your genitalia, tats by another artist on your buttcheeks, so each one doesn't see the others' work. Just gotta trust your sexual partners, then.

LOL . . Great ideas but there are a few holes in you plan. What if you gt a crooked-bitcoin-hoarding-mortician? What if you make porn?

Make it known to your survivors/executor that they need to be present as your corpse is first looked at naked, and to be ready to sweep the key.

Porn? Flesh-colored tape.

There are email services that check if there is activity or if you have logged on, then if nothing has happened in 3 or 6 months, assume that you are dead, and then email your beneficiaries.

Basically, an online dead man's switch. You can make a program that lives on a server do this.

I even read of someone who has a cron job or daemon or other software continually watch his facebook and twitter, and it will assume the owner is dead if there is no activity in 6 months.

The time delay is user configurable, I think a year is ok. I mean, what if you just got ship wrecked for a couple hundred days. You'd certainly need the coins if you are still alive when you get back to civilization.

Simply put your private keys in a Truecrypt container and protect it with Shamir's Secret Algorithm. Remember one key, write down a second key on paper and put the third key in your testament. You only need two out of three keys to access your wallet, so you always have access yourself but in case of death your family can use the key from the testament together with the key on paper to recover your wallet.
 
In case the paper key is destroyed at the time of your death, have a copy of this key in a safe in a bank somewhere (your family has access to this safe). Of course it would technically still be possible for your family to steal your paper key and somehow gain access to the key in your testament, but that would be theft and you could sue them. If you cannot trust your family enough to accept this risk, you should consider not leaving your wealth to your family at all.

Thats why people should store their bitcoins at MtGox so they never lose their bitcoin since MtGox is more or less a bank.

This sounds good. Is there any way to determine which of the 10 pieces were used for the recovery when the bitcoins are spent? Ideally I'd like a solution where I can set 1 key that can be used to spend them, and another 3 keys, two of which need to be used together to spend them, and I'd like it to be determinable from the blockchain which of the keys were used to spend them. Is this possible?

There will be plenty of options once all of the features have been implemented. Not sure of yours exactly, But I'm sure you'll find something that works for you.
Check out this thread
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=139625.0

I thought about this before. My countermeasure is to store a text file with instructions about how to use the wallet.dat file on the same USB drive. I also have shown my wife what to do.

I agree with this statement from earlier. Hardware may be obsolete when it is that time.
Also please use multiple thumb drives because it may just die before you use it. Electronics are not perfect forever.

Not a bad solution until something better comes along.


Will this apply to ALL dormant bitcoins or only those that have specifically been "time-locked"?

The broader question is "what happens to bitcoin as coins inevitably leak away irrecoverably due to lost wallets, forgotten passwords, incorrect destination address, etc"

Due to this bigger issue, the amount of circulating BTC will constantly decrease over time.  What effect will this have?

A very very good one. Kinda the opposite of fiat ;)

I love the idea of making a puzzle and giving family members parts of the puzzle and you need all of them to open the wallet.

Well, you can add 0.1btc lost to someone dying, a close friend of mine "past" not long ago, he had exactly 0.1btc

It will make my coins more valuable. So please, everyone, loose as many coins as you can.

i'm thinking of taking a key pair and turning it to gibberish through my own symbology and having the result engraved into a bit of metal or such... or, you know... just buying a cassacius coin...

A better question is how many people are going to die because of bitcoin crashing the next time? I imagine those people buying hundreds-thousands of coins at 50+ dollars are going to up suicide rate in their respective locations a good bit.

And hopefully some coins be lost because of that, thereby causing the price to soar up, defeating the very purpuse they died for.

This scenario would be tragic: A widow inherits his dead husbands house mortgage and credit card debts and his offline brain wallet, she is aware that he was a bitcoin geek that invested all their savings in bitcoins now worth millions of dollars - but he died in an accident and the wallet died with him.
An account at mtgox validated by ID or passport would have a much lesser risk in this case and the widow would have been a millionaire instead of a poor indebted woman on the street.

The husband, being a bitcoin geek, should have had a backup. Or at least trusts the wife enough to have the paper backup. As soon as I have at least 100 bitcoins (actually, maybe even less than that) I will have regular backups of the private keys on paper, in a place only my wife would have access to, like in her document vault or something like that.