Quote from: thecodebear on August 13, 2023, 06:53:29 PM

Provide your keys in a will. Could always do a multisig as well where the will only has one part of what you need to access the coins, so nobody can get it just by looking at the will, and your family members have other parts of the multisig but not enough to get the coins without the will so they can't access them until the will is presented.

Or provide a partial key in the will and your family already has the other part of the key so they just have to put them together when the person dies.

I believe you can also make a transaction so that after a certain amount of time they coins in the address, if they are still there, get transferred to another given address. You give your family this other address, of course then the coins would officially pass to them whenever that time is up, not at the person's death, so it could be before or after the death.

But I bet every year some bitcoin is lost to owners dying, and I'm sure this will continue in the future, as probably most people aren't setting up how they will transfer their bitcoin unless they are old or sick. For example if I died my family would have no access to my bitcoin (something my mom likes to bring up as a reason why I should give her my keys haha, in her scenario she would spend all my bitcoin on doctors and medical procedures if something happened to me so that I would wake up broke lol).

I find this Codebear post to be a bit of a springboard for my own post in this thread, and I am not sure if I have much to add in light of my having had posted in DdmrDdmr's thread on May 5, 2023.

Also I had not yet read Loyce's thread (already mentioned in this thread) on related topics or fillippone's thread.. and maybe I will put those two back on my "to read" list.

I get the sense that the more that I read through these kinds of topics, the more concerned that I get, even though there surely have been some members, in this thread suggesting that the problem is easy to resolve, which surely does not seem to be the case in terms of how much of a dilemma that we end up putting ourselves in regarding how much information to entrust to various people who we might choose to give them information prior to some kind of an instruction sheet that might be in the form of a will at an attorney's office, and we likely realize that we do not necessarily even have to have an attorney holding an instruction sheet, even though they surely are already used to having responsibility over holding sealed envelopes in which the contents are not read until the person had died.. and they tend to take those responsibilities seriously, but sure they could be a point of failure if they read the contents prior to being authorized to do so.

I don't really like some of the ideas of giving hardware wallets and presumably not sharing the back-up seed, which seems quite problematic if there is a hardware failure, as well as my not liking the idea of putting the harware wallet and the seed in the same place.

I do like ideas of dividing up information while hoping that it is not overly complicated because dividing up information may well end up having the information in one location to be destroyed or compromised, but if the information is just 1/3 of a seed then it is more difficult to use the 1/3 as a way to hack, but if they get 2/3 then it could get closer to being able to hack into the wallets.

And, let's not fool ourselves when it comes to how many places that we might hold bitcoins, so there could be several kinds of pieces of information that might be seeds to wallets and then various accounts that we might have and passwords to the accounts, but if the accounts are known and then there is proof of death, then there should be some assumption that coins held in those kinds of places should be recoverable...

so one thing is recovering the coins and then another thing is making sure that they get to the intended recipient, so yeah there could be some easy ways to do that, if you trust the person not to get into their coins prior to your death , then you could instruct them and pass them privately without going through any kind of dividing of keys or separating the instructions from the keys.

I don't really perceive the lawyer to be a problem in terms of necessarily jeopardizing the keys (if the keys are not actually given to him/her) - but that could be with anyone who we might trust with the instructions but not given the keys.. but maybe someone else might know that the keys are in three parts and where the three locations are .. but then there also might be two or three sets of the three locations. in case any of the locations might get compromised. which does happen.. houses do burn down, bank safety deposits do get raided (banks are destroyed sometimes too)..

I am not going to claim to know any one particular solution, because some of these matters change through time including which wallets/assets that any of us might hold and how easy it might be to update our information pieces that we are passing on, and surely one of the advantage of physical property as compared with digital property would be that the tangible item is not disappearing at the time of our death, even though the gold bar burried in the yard might not be discovered ever or maybe until 1,000 years later... so yeah the digital information may well die at the time of our death whether it is the private keys or the ways that they are put together, and there may be no way to connect the three pieces of paper with the private key if the instructions are lost.