Topic: Bitcoin is private and decentralized, ok but what if someone dies? - page 4. (Read 409 times)

It may be too late for your brother, but for everyone else:

https://medium.com/@pamelawjd/inheritance-planning-for-cryptocurrencies-3-steps-in-3-minutes-83ebb3e916a2

This is the case because we are still so so early. While bitcoin holders right now could make early preparations like creating instructions to recover their wallet/s if it's the case that they die unexpectedly early, remember that all this is new tech. I think it's highly likely that some genius could create a better wallet recovery method than multisig sometime in the future.

If he was storing his bitcoin himself then he had to store the private keys somewhere. This isn't something for Bitcoin to take care of, this is something for owners of Bitcoin to take care of. It is unfortunate he didn't talk to his wife about how he was storing his Bitcoin.

People have been thinking about this kind of problem for some time but at least to me you are making too much trouble of something that can be solved, you could tell your family that a particular hard drive contains your fortune and give it to them but in order to avoid them to access those coins prematurely you encrypt the hard drive, then you contact a lawyer and in your will you write the password to the hard drive, that way when you die your family members get access to your coins and never sooner than that.

Unless he gave his private keys or Seed (12-24 random words in a piece of paper) the coins he had are lost forever.

Probably he has a paper with 12-24 hidden somewhere in his house. The only chance of recovering those coins is by recovering that piece of paper.

It is very important that you explain that to his wife, so she can look for it. Maybe it will take some years for her to find, but it is important that she understand that this piece of paper with random words written on it is valuable.

That is also a good warning for all of us here: We all need to give some information about our bitcoins to a close relative who we can trust, so when we die our coins are not lost forever.

Probably they might state in their will that they will give their family the coins they have and leave the private key somehow?

That is probably the concern for most of us that when you die you take your BTC to the grave when you didn't share your pass and privatekeys with your kids. Its sad that if suddenly you just don't wake up in the morning, your kids won't be able to get your coins.

Unfortunately, you can't trust anyone even the lawyers who you leave your will and testament. You might want to do is educate your kid about crypto instead as early as you can so they learn. Its possible now that adoption is clearly coming. Teaching them to learn how to trade I think will be better.

If you have access to his PC for sure you can recover those coins... Just look at the saved passwords and history and you will be able to trace those coins.

I'm really sorry for your brother, is hard to lose a member of the family and I totally agree with you, his kids deserves those bitcoins, but not all the crypto users thinks about what will happen to our coins if we have an accident. And we should worry more about this topic. How many coins will be lost until we understand the importance of backup the private keys with someone else?

Bitcoin is a lovely concept but I feel it failed to include a system that considers the wealth of someone who suddenly dies and inherits his money to his loved ones "Family". I've always thought about this in my head, what happens to my money when I die.

The idea in writing my private key or long word sentence in a well is a method but is not efficient.

Because young people like many of us think we're going to live forever and we don't normally write wells, let's be honest here. Think about banks and real-life situation, here many of us hate the centralization and how government work on things, however, there is some benefit to what they do. When a person dies there's a system that automatically inherits all of your assets and money to your kids, which is a good thing and a plus in my book.

Bitcoin does not consider this! maybe if I am old I will write my private key for my family, but then again what are the chances that they would understand how to get the money? There are so many people who aren't computer savvy, so even if we go the extra mile of writing the sentence or the key in the well, a good chance that family members will not know how to use it and take it for granted. They don't know how much bitcoin worth and will neglect it, of course, given you wrote a well. What if you didn't?

Now, why did I bring this up? My brother who is one year older than me, he's only 40 when he died in a car accident last year. He talks nonstop about bitcoin and crypto so this indicates to me that he was investing. We don't know how much he owns, where he owns it, and how to give it back to his kids as heritage. His kids deserve to get that money but it's gone forever I'm assuming? so don't you think this is unfair, as I said bitcoin has a flaw that needs to be fixed in that sense.

What if my brother owns 4 or 5 BTC which his kids deserve? we will never know! the kids already got all the heritage out of the bank which is why I said the banks and government are a plus in that kind of issues/problems.

P.S. Most of his money goes into crypto and stocks, which is why the kids and his wife did not get much out of the banks, so with this, I don't know where to go to find out. If someone got an idea pls let me know.