Quote from: RobinW on November 19, 2013, 12:52:47 PM

As a newbie I spent some time online trying to learn what I needed to know about bitcoins.
Naturally, people are concerned about security. I found advice such as:
never store your bitcoins on a computer that is online
never write down keys, they could be read or stolen by others
never put keys on anything you could lose, such as usb drives etc.
All this makes sense and would appear to be sound.
However, it all leaves me wondering what happens to my bitcoins when I eventually pop my clogs.
Obviously it isn't safe to write down keys in your will.
If I gave a key to our daughter, she would either lose it, forget it, or abuse it.
So how would you leave your bitcoins to someone in your will? There doesn't seem to be any way of doing this.

It is possible to encrypt the private keys in such a way that multiple passwords are necessary to recover them. Then the encrypted password could be written down (perhaps in the will?). You could give each of several people that you trust one of the passwords. It would require collusion/cooperation among several of them to access the private key. You could choose how many passwords exist, and what percentage of them are necessary to decrypt the private key. (Example: 8 passwords, with any 4 passwords required for decryption)

Quote from: RobinW on November 19, 2013, 12:52:47 PM

I have read that when bitcoins are lost, there is no way of retrieving them. It's not as if someone could find them buried in a field in 50 years time.
Given that bitcoins will inevitably be lost for various reasons, it follows that the total number of bitcoins will decline steadily. Given enough time, maybe they will all be lost................?
What do others think?

No. As more bitcoins move out of circulation, the remaining bitcoins become more valuable. As bitcoins become more valuable, the quantity of bitcoins owned by any single person shrinks. Therefore, as the quantity of bitcoins in circulation shrinks, the quantity that any individual can lose shrinks as well.