I imagine if you had $75,000 in bitcoin, and a family you cared about, and you're not a nutjob, it would seem quite reasonable to me that you have taken some measures to reclaim this value for your heirs or beneficiaries in the event of your untimely demise.  This issue doesn't arise with most property as most property is not locked in an unbreakable safe. Even short of death, accidents do happen ...

-B

  Actually your bitcoins are floating around on the net.  They are stored in the block chain.  What's stored in your wallet are your private keys which lets you prove title to the bitcoins that are "floating around on the net".    Bitcoins are like subdividable realestate.  What's stored in your wallet are deeds (bitcoin addresses). Try this sometime,  copy your wallet to a backup, then receive some coins,  backup the new wallet (for your safety and comfort), restore the old wallet, watch your post backup coins magically reappear in your old backup wallet.

  Any escheat instructions would be signed, same as any other send, so they could not be forged anymore than any regular transfer could be forged.

-B

I have a suggested upgrade to the bitcoin protocol.

  One of the risks of bitcoin is if you forget your wallet password, loose your wallet, or die without telling others' how to access your bitcoins, etc. your bitcoins are unrecoverable and lost forever.   It would be nice to have an address owner specified escheat mechanism such that the protocol, not seeing any sends from an address in a user specifed  amount of time, will automatically transfer those bitcoins to a new, user specified address and/or perhaps email a loaded wallet to a user specified email address.  You get the idea.  This would be an opt in feature.  The default would be no escheat.  The escheat mechanism would be set in your wallet and be incorporated into the nomencalture of one's published public addresses.

-B

  I just registered so I'm a "newbie" even though I've been following bitcoin for almost a year.

  A well known issue with the bitcoin protocol is the ever increasing length of the block chain, a copy of which every client maintains, and which contains every transaction since day zero.  A possible solution occured to me:

  Why not have, after every 10,000 blocks or so, a "totalization" block that sums or totalizes the balance of every bitcoin address that has a non-zero balance (discard addresses that total to  zero balance).  This block can then be timestamped and hash signed by miners.  New regular blocks then continue on after, and are linked to, the totalization block.  After some number, perhaps 100 or so, of new blocks the totalization block can be considered validated and all block chain info prior to the totalization block can be discarded.  I'll call it "regenesis"!     A metaphor to think of is rocket staging on a trip to orbit.  The dead weight of older stages are discarded. For block chain length competiton you could accept the chain with the earliest totalization block with the longest chain of following blocks (but not more than 10,000). I'm sure there are issues to work out, but the idea seems sound to me.

-Cloudswrest