Nomination of someone in case of death on exchanges

[Jointops420]

To the various exchanges, there needs to be put in place an ability to nominate who you wish to leave your money or bitcoins to on proof of your death, an apostille maybe as an option.
The problem is that if I die will my family get my wealth.
I would like to see the ability on exchanges to nominate a heir. Its a hard enough time when you loose a loved one but doing this in advance would alleviate some of the pain for them so they dont get accused of money laundering or terrorism.
Not all of us are young and healthy and theres always an accident that can happen at any age, as bitcoin grows and hopefully its value its possible many of us are potential millionaires now, I would hate to think that in years to come my family could be living comfortably but an exchange wont release the funds on my death.

[Boussac]

Exchanges imho are not meant to be used for long term storage of any significant amount of bitcoins.
Paper wallets are the best option for long term storage, preferably stored in a sealed envelope in a vault of some sort (yes even a bank vault).
With a paper wallet, your bitcoins are just as easy for your heirs to access as a stash of bank notes.

[Jointops420]

Exchanges imho are not meant to be used for long term storage of any significant amount of bitcoins.
Paper wallets are the best option for long term storage, preferably stored in a sealed envelope in a vault of some sort (yes even a bank vault).
With a paper wallet, your bitcoins are just as easy for your heirs to access as a stash of bank notes.

The question is not really about storage its about the ability to make sure who gets my BTC in the event of death. What is storage classed as 5 minutes or 5 years, it wont matter if I drop dead on a day trade expecting to get in a quick trade and out again. I dont have all of my holdings at an exchange but I want to trade when I want to so I leave some there. Look at Mtgox's order book they are holding over a million in cash alone.

[alatus]

Partially agree on that. What if my GLBSE shares are my longterm holdings? As Bitcoin economy grows, BTC only - as storage of value - will make less and less sense.
But the problem is not so difficult to solve: simply leave your GLBSE password at a notary as same as you leave your last will.

[patcon]

I think the lower level feature that we need on any service holding bitcoin is the ability to provide an address into which the funds are automatically swept into after a designated period of inactivity. This address could be the address of loved ones, or it could be an address under your control.

Specifically, an address under your own control could be managed by some future tool that helps you manage a dead man's switch for all your crypto-assets. It would be silly to expect to implement a complex inheritance feature in every service that might manage small amounts of our bitcoin

[johncarpe64]

What you need to do is to provide instructions for whoever you want to "inherit" your bitcoin that can be found in the event of your death. If this person is not familiar with bitcoin then you would obviously need to leave instructions as to how to secure and use their "new" bitcoin.

I would say that the best way to get this to happen would be to somehow put your private keys in a safe deposit box that is accessible to the person you want to have the bitcoin only upon your death. They would find the private key (and instructions if necessary)