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You will want to be sure that your assets outside of your POD accounts are sufficient to cover your debts and any tax liability, otherwise your creditors (or the tax collector) may come after those who received the POD accounts, which can be unpleasant.
Which brings up some other points which is in a lot of places your debts die with you. Except for debt that is covered by real property. i.e. the $5000 someone owes Chase MasterCard will die with them. The $50000 they owe on the mortgage will stay attached to the property. Taxes will vary. But, in some places you can't transfer the property till the debt is paid so the property stays in the estate till the mortgage is paid off. [Side note of real life I had to deal with this along with a friend for a place in Arizona. What a pain.] In other parts of the world other debt might follow the estate. In others it all goes away as you are required more or less to have insurance to cover property debt.
I think that is always going to be part of the problem too.
BTC is world wide, how do you create a setup that will work in all the jurisdictions around the world and keep up with them as they change. And so on. Along with contested wills, and other potential things.
Just because it can be done, does not mean it should be done. And then where do you draw the line?
But, this is drifting a bit OT, it's not about the ramifications of the
BTC transfer, but about the transfer itself.
You can then use you wallet normally and when you die the executor hands over their words to the person getting the wallet who then would have complete access to it.
And I'm asking why should there be an executor? We've designed a system in which we transact without having an intermediary, just like cash, but we need an executor to inherit? We don't. The system allows trustless inheritance.
Your solution:
Alice wants from Charlie to receive 1 BTC from her when she passes away. Thus, she creates a 2-of-2 multi-sig wallet, deposits the bitcoin and gives one key to Bob, the executor, and the other key to Charlie. When she dies, Bob gives his key to Charlie. Now, Charlie has access to the money.
Flaw: Bob may not give the key for a million reasons. It's down to him if Charlie gets the money or not.
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My solution:
Alice wants from Charlie to receive 1 BTC from her when she passes away. Thus, Charlie creates a wallet, gives her an invoice, she signs a transaction where she gives the bitcoin, but adds a condition that the transaction is valid after a specific time period. If she's alive after this period, they redo the process. If she's gone, Charlie can broadcast the transaction and get the money.
It's important to note here, in a situation like this in many many many parts of the world you NEED to have human involvement. There has to be someone handling the estate you cannot (legally) just hand over money.
You may need to state it officially that you're inheriting Alice's assets and therefore get taxed, but I find no reason to use an intermediary for that purpose. In most countries bitcoin is considered an unrealized gain, so you may not even need to state you're even inheriting it.
Taxes usually have very little to do with it. It's is the person getting the money really entitled to it? We can disagree with the law(s) all we want. But for now in many parts of the world there are very strict rules covering how an estate is distributed. Going around them although doable and common even without
BTC can cause and have caused years of legal issues for people if others choose to fight it.
And I am going to say this and leave it alone, until you have had dealings with a contested will over an amount of money that is worth less then a cheap used car you have no idea of the shit storm that can happen over a bit of money.As for the executor not giving the person entitled to it the information needed. They could just as easily not had over cash accounts, or titles to property or a dozen other things.
-Dave