When there's trust with the immediate family members be it siblings, wife, or children then there's no big deal in confiding trust in one of them,
You need to be careful Aanuoluwatofunmi when you presume that your choices in regards to who to trust or how much to trust them is necessarily amongst the better of decisions for other members - especially since there are likely a whole hell of a lot of variety in terms of individual circumstances that involve possible relationships and even possible size of the stash considerations.
So, yes, it would be better if any member is able to identify at least a couple of people whom s/he is able to trust with financial information or even successorship information, yet even in the best of circumstances, there could be issues that might not even exactly involve the BTC HODLer, but might involve the potential beneficiaries or the trusted person.. in terms of their competency, their interests in the topic and their trustworthiness (even though that trustworthiness part seems to be what you are wanting to presume to be present within certain kinds of relationships).
if you see someone who is completely adamant in trusting people that could be so close to him from the examples made then such person as well should be suspected with having some kind of hidden agenda uncalled for, just as we know that any bitcoin we hodl and we couldn't have access it unblocking keys on the blockchain by us or our family member is a waste and such is gone for life without anyone benefiting from it,
For sure, any of us who have attempted to think through the problem of how much to share or how much trust to provide in others in regards to our BTC instructional information and/or password information are going to realize that part of the risk of not sharing enough is going to be either completely losing the access for the benefits of potential loved-one beneficiaries or even being able to benefit some cause that we might want to contribute to in order that the accumulation of our bitcoin would not go to waste in terms of our individual ability to benefit from our BTC holdings after our death (or disability).
i still could wonder how some people could have nobody to trust in life including wife and children, what will such individual leave behind for them to enjoy if anything happens.
This seems to be your own lack of imagination to be unable to relate towards normal/regular people having various circumstances in which some of them do not end up having anyone in his/her life that s/he is able to trust. Sure there are crazy and strange people, but there are also likely strange and crazy circumstances that are not exactly like the circumstances that you have in your life an in your surroundings, that you presume any "normal/regular" person should have. Sure, sometimes individuals might be culpable in creating their own situation and/or problem in regards to NOT having anyone in their lives in which they can trust, and perhaps there are other kinds of fluke circumstances or even unintended or unrealized circumstances that end up happening that might not have had been as foreseeable as you might want to proclaim them to be in order that you can assign culpability to the person who finds himself/herself in such circumstances of NOT feeling that s/he can trust anyone.
I'm not thinking of dying anytime soon as I'm very young.
Of course, you are not thinking about it.
It is a common problem that seems to be way worse amongst young people, and it is quite understandable that young and healthy people may even have tendencies to believe that they are going to live forever and even have abundance of energy that they believe that they are going to be able to retain into their older ages, but without realizing that some aspects of aging are outside of our control, and surely even some aspects of our starting points in life are out of our control too.. .. and some people are better able to adapt, prosper and even thrive from relatively bad starting points - which likely contributes towards longer living and better living conditions..
But to be honest for now I've no one I can entrust with such sensitive information like the seed phrase to my wallet. But to answer this question, there's need for someone you trust to know the seed phrase or private keys to your bitcoin wallet and other crypto asset wallet par adventure something unexpected happens to you, the family can still get access to your funds. I'm just courting, I don't have kids, only siblings... But when I find the right person I would do the needful.
I cannot disagree with any of these kinds of points, and many of us realize that even folks who enter into relations with another person (and even have kids with that other person), may well discover, at a later point in life, that they are not able to trust that other person.. and there could be a variety of reasons that the trust is either lost, or not able to be built... and sometimes it is difficult to realize the extent to which trust is built or lost.. until later down the road...and then at that point, it can be difficult to start over.. but instead there would be needs to start from a different starting point and of course, having the experiences of the earlier situation which could either cloud judgement, create bitterness or maybe, alternatively, contribute towards the person having greater enlightenment later on in life in part by feeling more informed from the earlier experiences.
My body began to fail. I slurred my speech, lost strength in my hands, and my legs were slow to recover. In August, 2009, I was given the diagnosis of ALS, also called Lou Gehrig's disease, after the famous baseball player who got it.
.........
But my life expectancy is limited. Those discussions about inheriting your bitcoins are of more than academic interest. My bitcoins are stored in our safe deposit box, and my son and daughter are tech savvy. I think they're safe enough. I'm comfortable with my legacy.
Hal Finney has come to the end of his life and just before his deathbed he shares the precious words of life for everyone in our Bitcoin forum. No matter how sweet life may be, there is an end to life and we must suffer that end. We all have to face the eternal truth of death and prepare ourselves accordingly.
Hal Finney left bitcoins in a secure offline wallet for his wife and children, reminding him repeatedly that bitcoin would become a valuable competitive currency near the end of his life. If a man leaves bitcoins for his children's safety on his deathbed then we should leave bitcoins for our children and spouses like him.
None of us can tell when someone will die and we can't tell the state of our wallet when we are on the brink of death so we should disclose or document important security things like wallet password, backup key, seed phase etc. among trusted family members. Go so that we can recover our stored bitcoins after our death.
For sure, there are some unique circumstances with Hal that is not really part of the hypothetical that OP outlined - and surely, there could be some people who fall into circumstances similar to Hal's, but I doubt that is the case.
In this thread, OP presented a hypothetical in which any of us needs to consider taking a snap-shot regarding where we are at right at this moment - in the event that we were struck by death - and perhaps presuming that whatever our other life circumstances, such as our papers, notes and electronic devices were not wiped out in such scenario - but even the OP's hypothetical seems to be have had been open enough in order that we likely should be attempting to assign probabilities (rather than presuming) in regards to whether our backups (or access to passwords and information about our BTC holdings) would be sufficient in order to sufficiently allow for our intended beneficiaries to be able to transfer the BTC value to their control.. so that our part is done.. and the circumstance in which any of us knows in advance about or impending doom (soon death) seems to be more of a minority scenario that may or may not end up fitting within the circumstances that OP proposed to be part of the question presented in this thread.
By the way, I had not even assigned any kind of probability to my own abilities and/or success in passing down my coins, and it seems that at each stage in my 9.5 year bitcoin journey, my assessment of my ability to pass down coins and the actual practicality of those coins being passed down would have changed.. sometimes the perceptions of the ability to pass down coins might not really match up with the actuality of what would have likely happened if I had dropped dead at any point in the past 9.5 years.. so my assessment of my ability to pass down the coins might not have had matched the reality of whether coins would have had been successfully passed down.... so maybe I have had periods of less than 50/50 and even now gosh, I wonder if the odds are even better than 70%, even though I have been working on various angles to both preserve the passing down of instructional and password information but also figuring out ways that if any specific part of that instructional/password information were to be intercepted, that it would not be enough, on its own, to remove my coins from me while I am still living... and don't get me wrong, there have been some times in the past 9.5 years that I have had coins removed from me, against my then preferences.
Anyway, I have already written the seed phase of my Electrum bitcoin wallet to my younger brother and my wife in a diary so that if something happens to me, they can retrieve my stored bitcoins for future use.
I don't want to know about too many of your details, and sure I think that it is better to have more than one person who has potential information to get your coins.. but there are possibilities that your information could be too transparent if it is all in one place.... and another thing is that if you have some coins that are in other places, and so many of bitcoiners likely experiment with a variety of different wallets that likely would include exchanges (or third parties) and even lightning wallets (some of which are meant to be self-custodial and others that involve third parties), and there might be some other circumstances in which we move coins to make them more secure (such as adding passwords or maybe even multi-signature set-ups), and there may well be a certain level of ongoing evolution in what each (and any) of us is doing, and we need to both secure the information for ourselves, but also potentially be able to pass on that information to intended beneficiaries.
Of course, when the amounts might be small, we might end up being less preoccupied by how much BTC might be stored in any one of our preserved locations; however, we also know that sometimes the value of bitcoin can change quite dramatically (including to the upside) in terms of where some of our coins might be held... I recall some coins that I had held at specific addresses in 2015/2016 that amounted to around $100 in value, and the BTC price at that time was perhaps around $350.. .. so some of those coins may well would have had been around 0.3 BTC... and I did not consider them to be very much; however, when the BTC price went up to $19,666 in late 2017, then 0.3 BTC becomes a value of nearly $6k, and so then some of the relatively small amounts of value end up becoming way more important than we had originally consider the value to have had been relatively small amounts of value kept in various locations that we had not been keeping close track and we might not have had been securing very well.. but when $100 becomes $6k, then our attention to the coins might change.. and even in that same scenario, we could consider instances in which $1k became $60k in a matter of around a couple of years..... or even in a shorter period of time, depending on when the measuring time might have had happened..and some amounts that we had been ignoring became way more important in terms of our own desires to treat those amounts more seriously at a later point down the road.
Still many of us ignore the fact that it is an universal truth. Maybe many of us are still thinking that with in short possible of time we will give the keys of our wallet to someone we trust. When death will be occurred there will be no chance to get a little moment and at that time our bitcoins will not be recoverable. Things that seem easy to me that I can figure out these keys in less than a minute, but when I die, the descendants can't even try for a lifetime. So instead of being lazy, those keys should be quickly shared with someone you trust.
It may also happen that someone suddenly becomes paralyzed due to a stroke and loses his memory, in which case he can't recover his bitcoins even when he's alive. It's harder than dying. In such a situation, even if you have your bitcoins, you will lose your keys.
Like you seem to be suggesting GigaBit, at the time of our "impending death" we might not even realize that we are going to die.... Many people presume that they are going to live, even when they are put into life-critical circumstances. ... .. and then like you said.. some situations are similar to death, especially if we end up experiencing some kind of head trauma.. or even if we might be alive but we are not able to communicate with anyone that we trust for an extended period of time...
....so then the password and/or instructional information in regards to our BTC stash does not get transmitted to the intended recipient(s).. such that we might have wanted to say: "look under the third couch pillow in the green couch in the garage for the secret instructional paper - that will lead the intended person (hopefully) to the password information that is located in 3 places we did not even write any of those instructional pieces (or sufficiently keep them up-to-date, if we had written them).
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