Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Best route to setting up a bitcoin timelock?
by
squatter
on 16/01/2020, 05:49:56 UTC
This thread may be of interest to you: Using Locktime for inheritance planning, backups or gifts

Instead of the paper wallet in that example, you could give your family the 24-word seed and send the funds to an address derived from it.
Oh I see. This is probably not the solution I am looking for then because I want to be able to access the funds in the meantime. I think an easier way to describe it would be for me to have some sort of dead mans switch, where I send some satoshi's to an address behind my two-factor to keep the funds alive every few months, and if there is no inbound satoshi's being detected after x time it then releases the funds to another address derived from my seed phrase that is not behind the two factor passphrase. So the solution linked above would be great for cold storage but my use case isn't specifically cold storage.

Think about how vulnerable and unreliable that would be. These scripts would need to be self-executing, hosted on a live server, with access to your private keys. What happens if the server gets compromised? What if there is a hardware failure or power outage preventing script execution... and you're dead? Alternatively, you can utilize a trusted third party like deadmansswitch.net -- similar pitfalls.

With locktime, you can access the funds in the meantime. It's just that every time you spend, the timelocked transaction paying your heirs will become invalid because of double spent inputs. In other words, spending those outputs achieves the same thing as "sending satoshis to an address" in your example above -- it prevents the switch from activating. To recreate the dead man's switch, you'll just need to craft a new timelocked transaction each time you spend.