Bitcoin Forum

wallet.dat could be unlock after 10-20 years of inactively.
This would allow encrypted coins that were locked away to become accessible after their owner die by their family.
The time would have to be measured by the bitcoin network.

I don't have the whole idea yet but it is a seed of an idea.

There was a reason for the wallet.dat files not being encrypted day one.

i think its too late to implement such a change, i could be wrong but this is just the way the system is, there will always be leakage due to death etc, but what can you do really, at least with a central governed bank/currency they can just re-distribute the funds but in this instance they are gone forever.. but on the upside it drives the currency value up.

Heh, start sending them into the hashes.  It'd give a purpose to our hashes no?

The encryption of the wallet.dat hasn't happened yet, that is coming with the next version of the client. There could still be some way to embed a time based unlock code into the bitcoin Merkle tree.

And it will be optional and, if I remember correctly, left unencrypted by default.

10-20 year wait period just wouldn't work well for the system. Not that I think bitcoin is even close to flawless in principle, but in 10-20 years the price of those bitcoins would be worth a shitload more if the currency was widely adopted.

Looks like a dead mans switch idea was already suggested and looks very promising. http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=5194.msg147032#msg147032