One downside of good cryptographic privacy is that funds will be lost if the key is forgotton or not known. How can someone ensure funds are not lost after death?

Apart from relying on a trusted third party for escrow, I can see two possible technical solutions:

  1. An M-of-N wallet transfer scheme where keys are given to trusted relatives or written in the Will.
  2. An automatic transfer of the wallet balance to a specified account after a specified time (target date or period of inactivity).

Any solution must prevent the possibility of third parties abusing the process to steal the balance before death.

Is a reasonable process available now?

Would future multisig allow option one?

Are there any other features in the road-map which can support this, and is this concern something that the development team or MRL would try to address?

See also: this question


Even if not implemented on wallet, you could use secret sharing - such as Shamir's secret sharing with, for example, three keys to encrypt your wallet or wordlist. Then you would keep one with yourself and the other two with trusted relatives. Your key alone wouldn't be able to decrypt your wallet. So you could keep it in your Will, so that when you die your relatives could use their keys and your key to decipher your wallet/wordlist.

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