Die testate with your Bitcoin. Death is inevitable

[o_e_l_e_o]

Requires less technical knowledge too.

Also requires complete trust in a third party. You must store your coins on the exchange the entire time you are alive, trusting that they will protect them, keep them secure, not scam you, not become insolvent, not close down, not lock your account, etc., and you must also trust the exchange to continue to do all those things after your death as well as honoring the promise they made to you. That's an awful lot of trust and an awful lot of ways something could go wrong.

I have been looking forward to when we will have a project on the blockchain that will handle this aspect of our life and saving us the worries of what will happen to our coins when we are no more. A platform where individuals can’t take some steps that will allow the transfer of access and ownership of the wallet to a next of King when they are gone.

Any such centralized platform will necessarily require some amount of trust and introduce some amount of risk, either of private keys being leaked, the wrong person claiming the coins, or something similar. There have been multiple trustless and private ways discussed already in this thread and others about the best way to plan for your death. You would be better off following one of those.

[Pmalek]

It's really not that hard to make such arrangements while you are still healthy.
If your life partner doesn't understand or wants to learn about Bitcoin and crypto while you are still here, they will become interested if you tell them: these words you see written down on this piece of paper are the keys to a $500.000 fortune (change the figure to whatever you want).

Don't let anyone see them and never take pictures of it or store it online. When I am gone, visit https://bitcointalk.org/, register an account and ask for help. Use your best judgement and common sense. You will get the help you need in public and for free.

Write the following:

Hi,

I am "name here".
My spouse passed away and left a note telling me to register on this forum. I have a set of 24 different words, How and what am I supposed to do with them? He told me this is the best place to get help with Bitcoin.

[o_e_l_e_o]

When I am gone, visit https://bitcointalk.org/, register an account and ask for help.

And then get spammed by wannabe scammers who will try to get you to reveal your seed phrase, or download some malicious wallet, or sign up to a malicious website, or so on.

If you can leave instructions regarding signing up to this forum and asking for help, then you can leave instructions on where to download a reputable wallet or to buy a hardware wallet. At the very least, if your partner knows literally nothing about bitcoin, then you could leave them a list of names of a few users whom you trust and advise that they listen to their advice only.

[Pmalek]

If you can leave instructions regarding signing up to this forum and asking for help, then you can leave instructions on where to download a reputable wallet or to buy a hardware wallet.

Yes, but that reputable wallet from today might not be around 10 years from now or it might not be as reputable as it once was. An open-source software can turn closed source and a non-custodial service might want to be custodial.

At the very least, if your partner knows literally nothing about bitcoin, then you could leave them a list of names of a few users whom you trust and advise that they listen to their advice only.

Nothing wrong with that suggestion either in present times. 10 years from now, you might no longer be around (if you are on my list ), and that could be true for the other 2 or 3 names I put there as well.

[o_e_l_e_o]

-snip-

I would assume that you would be periodically updating your instructions, say every 6 months or so, so they are not being used 10 years after you wrote them. Even if Electrum (for example) stopped being developed today, in 6 months' time there would almost certainly still be Electrum servers running and easily sourced copies of the latest version to download. Even if I stopped using the forum today, it would be unlikely for 3 other senior members who have all been around for many years to all stop using the forum within the next 6 months too.

Maybe some advice along the lines of "Only listen to people with positive trust and 1000+ merit" might be better? Not foolproof for receiving good advice, but better than listening to any old user if you know absolutely nothing about bitcoin.

[lightning0]

This is something worth doing now. Unexpectedly or tomorrow, I don’t know which one will come first. I am not married yet. My parents are the most trustworthy people. I can tell them my wallet password now.

There is one more thing that needs to be prepared, tell them how to withdraw and use these funds and trade them.

[o_e_l_e_o]

In this respect one should probably rely on private keys that give access to his BTC rather than on particular wallet. Looks like the current private keys  would remain valid even in the era of post-quantum cryptography if it were come into reality as its quantum-resistent algos  would affect public keys, solely, but not private keys. Correct me if I'm wrong with that.

This is all correct. Quantum computers, if and when they reach such a stage, will be able to exponentially speed up solving the discrete logarithm problem, which means they can calculate a private key from a public key. They will only be able to linearly speed up the process of reversing a hash function, meaning that it will still be impossible to calculate a public key from an address.

If you store coins on a brand new address, which only you know the private and public key for, then they will remain safe against quantum computers, since quantum computers cannot reverse the hash processes used to create the address. If, however, you store coins on a reused address, then they will no longer be safe against quantum computers, since the public key of the address is revealed in the blockchain whenever that address makes a transaction, and quantum computers can use that publicly revealed public key to calculate the private key.

It is also better to rely on seed phrases or private keys as opposed to individual wallet files, since that guarantees compatibility in the future.

[Pmalek]

I can tell them my wallet password now.

There is one more thing that needs to be prepared, tell them how to withdraw and use these funds and trade them.

It's interesting that you mentioned "password", not seed or private keys. In addition to that, the sentence immediately after is about "withdrawing" and "trading" coins. Seems to me that you are storing your funds on an exchange or some other type of custodial service that provides you with login details and passwords instead of recovery phrases and/or private keys. You might want to consider more safer storage options and something were you are in control of your finances.   

[sapnu]

I guess not many people want to talk of death but we need to understand that it is inevitable to a living being including you. The word death is two edged sword, that is, it can touches the speaker and listener or reader. So desist from panicking at the instance of hearing death  Just do what you need to do


The word death on the thread topic may have sent shivers down some people's spine but don't allow your coins add up to the lost coins. You sure know that some wallets today have lots of bitcoin that are regarded as lost because of no activity or transactions on them for longtime, maybe due to lost passwords or death. You want that to happen to your hard earned coins ?

So if we don't want that kind of experience that when you are no more on the earth, the people behind and your loved ones can go on enjoying your labour dying testate is making a will lol.

I have simply been saying the need to make our will on beneficiary(ies) of our coins. Cryptocurrency isn't just a push over because it has come to stay like other commodities. The volumes and marketcap keep rising, showing adoption, acceptability.

Remember bitcoin didn't just become $62k today but grew from very small satoshi , and just that way many altcoins will become very big in our life time and after we are gone. Therefore, secure your coins, inform your next of kin about it. You can write a will and die testate with your coins 

It has been an issue that has been talked about for a long time already. We cannot deny the fact that this needs attention because death is indeed something we can never predict from happening. After long years of earning from investing or trading in bitcoin, we would not like it to go to waste without having no one to benefit from it specially the reason why you worked hard for. I hope one day, there would be a system that allows us to transfer our earnings to someone we choose if ever a sudden death takes place together with a legal proofs that the owner of the bitcoin is legitimately dead.

[Arvin01]

Yeah, death is inevitable... Sad, but true. I remember there was some similar topics in past already. I thought about it several times. Well, If I would die tomorrow, it's most likely that my Bitcoins would be lost forever. I'm still young and I'm not planning to die soon. But what if...? You know, everything can happen, car accident, plane crash, hearth attack and etc. So, I think it's worth to consider what will happen if such case. I don't want that my Bitcoins would be lost forever. It's significant amount of money which would help to my family member seriously.
Probably I'm not going to make things complicated. I keep most of my crypto in hardware wallet. So, I need to make instruction how to take coins from it and where they can find PIN code of it. But what if this information will appear in bad hands?

I told my family and children the password, because then as we get older and older, our memory will not be as good as before. In the future, our money will definitely be reserved for children. If you can, it's better to tell now.
You really need to pay attention to account security. If I write the password on paper, it is easy to lose it. I am used to putting it in a safe place in case I forget where to put it in the future.
Friends in the crypto market should write their passwords in their notebooks or tell their family members, because no one can think of what will happen tomorrow, after all, this is part of wealth.

[B-Bit]

We never know which one will come first, tomorrow or death, so we have to be prepared, sometimes death is inevitable.
I have now told my family of my password, because I am afraid that I will forget some things when I get older, so it is a good thing to have family members to help memorize it.
If I don’t tell my family my password, my family may lose a protection if something happens to me, and a scary thing happened a few days ago when the elevator suddenly had an accident and dropped sharply. , I was very scared at the time, I didn't know what to do anymore, and I didn't have any thoughts about any actions at that time. The brain is blank. Fortunately, the elevator stopped soon, and we all got out of the elevator safely.
After this incident, I told my family and children that we still have to love life. We never know what is waiting for us.