Topic: How to pass on bitcoins to your children/beneficiaries (Read 5048 times)

you can put these in bank locker also as do with other papers and files in lockers we can do also with this all

Keyfile or long password, it can't be abused. Properly implemented, no one can steal your cold storage bitcoins. Denial of service is possible, but stealing the coins is not.

I mean, not without attempting brute force.

Paper wallet in a good strong safe stored in your house. Spare key with your good old fashioned will, securely stored by your lawyer.

I'm not sure you understand the concept of keyfiles in true crypt... the company could never even access the trucrypt container without all the keyfiles, they could never abscond with your btc's. All they could do is deny they had been engaged, but you lawyer would know that in your will

Your last will and testament is a dead man's switch.

If you die, your heirs or your estate gets the sealed envelope.

The digital version just changes the mechanics a bit. It becomes digital. It becomes encrypted. (the dead man company can't steal what they can't decrypt.)

There are paid versions where the holder of the digital stuff have employees that require an obit or death certificate. The free ones and the google inactive account manager just makes it easier for me to pass my measly 10 or 100 BTC to my kids or whoever.

Life Insurance companies do something similar. After paying your premiums, if you die, your kids get a million. They don't even have to file a claim. Some lawyer from the bank or insurance company will come looking for the next of kin automatically.

there has been no need for a dead man switch for centuries... bitcoin is no different the a bearer bond. all it requires is writing details in a will as to how to use it.

EG "i leave the contents of the safety deposit at bank xyz to my beloved chldren" then inside the safety deposit box is everything they need.

as for a deadman switch service meeting up with family.. well im not american so thats instantly $1000 for the service just to cover flight costs, then car rental fee's and labour.. your looking at atleast $2000 total..

id rather stick to the good old 'last will and testiment'. much cheaper, more legally and securely stored. and the family know where to go to to see the will.. unlike a deadman switch.. if i died, firstly if my family did not know about bitcoins there is nothing stopping a deadman switch company just keeping the funds and denying knowledge of any agreement.

put simply a deadman switch is a useless brainfart that is just going to be abused

No attachments. Except google, can attach your entire life on everything google. The point of the email is to just give either the private key or a password to an encrypted file. Your file can be gigabytes if you include pictures and other stuff.


They are not going to crack my GPG / PGP encrypted email anytime soon. Not before 2060, and probably not before I die. 4096 bit RSA keys? It took hobbyists an entire year to do 768 bit RSA keys, using 100,000 computers. I forgot the details, but you can look it up. The NSA is too busy cracking 1024, and 2048 bit RSA keys to try bothering us types with 4096 bit RSA keys. In the future, I can always upgrade to larger keys when the apps for it are more commonly available. Then I can send my bitcoins from the old address to the new address.


If they are old enough to use a computer and understand public key cryptography, I will know if they can handle it. Otherwise, the email goes to a trusted person who can take care of them, like another relative who is old enough. (and who I can probably give some bitcoins to as well.)

I could also, instead, just give the GPS location of a buried container with USB flash drive / SD card, whatever storage medium, that contains what they need.


Maybe. After all, they have a lifetime paid subscription. I'm sure, if they disappear soon, we will find out. As for Google, I don't know if they will still be around 25 years from now, but they seem to be on track to stick around long after I die.

That'd work for above idea - just give half the password to one person, and the other half to the other person.. tell the whole family who has 1 half and no one who has the other... that way if someone buys all this new stuff, the known person can be blamed and held accountable. There are other benefits to splitting it like this... if the unknown person tries to collude prior to death, the known person can come to the wallet holder and ask that the unknown person be replaced. Why not just give the password to 1 person... they are a target for pressure or can do a runner prior to death. In the will, the unknown person can be revealed. The issue is either of the two people losing their half passwords, or claiming they have.

I don't know, but really it's just passing on a password to an online wallet. If you give them the identifier to the wallet, the password to someone else for safekeeping, and then the recipient can check no bitcoins have been transferred after death.

Are attachments encrypted when using pgp or should one put the contents of an attachment into the message body instead?

Did you attach a wallet to your pgp message if indeed attachments are encrypted, or did you have to put the private keys into the message body?

How confident are you with PGP now given the recent NSA revelations since you know they are sweeping up pgp emails for later scrutiny?

How confident are you that your kids will keep their public/private key pair safe  and sound?  Will they remember their passwords?  

Will Deadman be around in 25 years?

Guys.. Have you looked at https://deadmansapphr.appspot.com/ ?

That's exactly what I have set up. There are alternative services.

The key is, use GPG encryption. Then the provider can never read the email.

If you use gmail or google accounts, you can also use their inactive account manager.
https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/account/inactive

Ok, both are free. (dead man's switch has a paid version if you want to send more than 2 emails.)

I haven’t really fleshed it out yet, but for myself, I’m considering creating a document with hundreds of if-then statements based on information about me that would allow my loved ones to collectively, but not individually, decode one or more passwords.

It might look something like this:

If the name of the city where I was born begins with ‘A’, then the first character of the password is ‘6’.
If the name of the city where I was born begins with ‘B’, then the first character of the password is ‘U’.
If the name of the city where I was born begins with ‘C’, then the first character of the password is ‘=’.

…and so on.

Perhaps a coder could build on this idea and automate the process.

the dead man switch would be for the bitcoin or (bicoin now) service to go and find the beneficiaries

a main point of the service is they come to you in person, and they teach you and examine your understanding.

further as they will only hold one of the keyfiles, they can't steal the btc from you.

I accept the trust thing is an issue....

Considering the fact that your not actually dead yet, you'd be better off simply encrypting your private keys and giving them the password and drilling it into them until they remember. If you go bottom up before you can achieve that, you're probably not going to be able to set up a complex legal will with all the parameters required to ensure that they get it anyway, so basically just too bad.

more posts dedicated to trying to set up insurance policies..

i love the way they say for people to not trust the legality of a will, but to trust them as honourable people to look after you when you die.

which losely translates to, dont tell anyone in your family about bitcoin, dont write it in your will, then when you die no one will chase after it.

the best suggestions are the conventional ones. put it in your will, store it safely and put detailed instructions with it.

to all those saying 'but the family wont know what to do' .. well i can think of many things, such as property deeds, bearer bonds and company shares that many relatives of mine would have no clue how to cash out. but i would never let some stranger on the other side of the planet make empty promises to honour a dead man switch if i died. people have gone through bereavement for millions of years without a need of a deadman switch, bitcoin is no different.

think about it, when you die your family receive an email

"inlight of your recent bereavement it has come to our attention that your family member held some funds with our service, please provide your bank details, name, address and identification to prove that you are the executor of our customers accounts. we will then convert the funds to a currency of your choice, minus our fee's"

sound familiar to other emails people get in their spam box daily?

Even better, use multisig transactions.  That way your semi-trusted executors could prove to you (or others) that they still have the fragment you have given them without revealing the fragment (or getting the fragments together).  If at some point one is lost, you can still get the others together and move to a new set of multisigs. 

You also want to be clear to the executors about what you want to do with your coins.  A notarized will is what you need here; feel free to stick it on a block chain to make it extra-notarized.   

what I mean by 'company' is rather the aspect of a company that offers permanent succession and not dependent on any single person being alive or working for them, much in the same way the cyrgenic freezing 'companies' are set up.

It may be a trust, foundation, company, etc...any way that's one of the features of a company I was trying to strike at.

a 'Company' ...  

Why not implant an RFID a flashdrive with the private key somewhere in your body?
Your family can throw a treasure-hunt party after you die  

a coin willing to go both ways?

This question too, crossed my mind.