By the way, I am still on the lookout for a reliable dead man switch arrangement. I'm afraid if anything happens to me, my family won't be able to collect. Any tips? Should I open yet another thread "out there"?
The best way I can see this working is by already transmitting the transaction, to a wallet that your family already own, but with a time delay of anywhere between a few months and a decade (depending on your desire for maintenance). I'd like to think this can be done by transmitting into a specific block in the future with
nLockTime (
discussion here), but I may be wrong. Possibly there are features within the lightning network that can facilitate this as well but again not sure.
This would act as the most reliable insurance for worst case scenarios, and don't already have shared custody set up, but more importantly would guarantee that your family get your Bitcoin, at an eventual date of your chosing - without the need for the switch, which is a single-point-of-failure in itself. What if you don't have access to your switch for example? Pragmatically speaking this is what you want I believe, a permanent solution dependent only on the variable of time, as opposed to your access to a switch.
Hope that helps with the brainstorming.
Thanks for your reply, dragonvslinux.
Unfortunately, your proposed solution doesn't cut it for me.
My family are mostly nocoiners.
Besides, I don't like to set up a transaction to a different address. IMO, the coins shouldn't move if there is no need to cash out.
What I would like to do is send an encrypted email with instructions on redeeming a wallet through its seed - and send it NOW.
The dead man switch I am imagining would just send the key to decrypt the email containing the seed.
You better hope that those lame heirs of yours do not delete the email or fail to keep that e-mail account active.
In late 2014, I recall that the price of Bitcoin was around $385 at the time. I had verified an e-mail address of a friend and his son. I told the dad that I was sending bitcoin to both him and to his son, and I wanted to make sure that I sent the bitcoin to a properly valid e-mail address. He verified the e-mail addresses and I sent the bitcoin to each address. I believe that I confirmed with him a couple of times soon after sending the bitcoins and then again about a year after I had sent the bitcoins.
Then in about January 2018, he "became aware" of bitcoin, and realized that the value that I had sent him had gone 50x at some time towards the top of BTC's price move but he had not opened either of the e-mails. He said that he no longer had access to those e-mail accounts because they were tied to a family domain name and account that had been closed. I told him that there was nothing that I could do about it on my end. Maybe I was acting as if I was dead, and I had already done me part, including reminding verifying with him and reminding him on a couple of occasions, but he did not take any action at all to secure the value (the e-mail), until it was too late.
I could think of other scenarios too, in which using an e-mail address might not be so great, and it might not even be the fault of the intended BTC recipient - third party risk that involves them continuing their services. Remember in the early 2000s, so many people built websites on geocities, and sure they announced that they would be closing down, before they did close down, but a lot of people lost their data if they did not back that data up when they did actually pull the plug from their services.