Bitcoin Inheritance Planning
Secure Key Management & Legal Title Transfer Strategies
You can download the full report from here.
Bitcoin is a multigenerational asset. For individuals who understand the long-term trajectory of its adoption and appreciation potential, bitcoin is more than a mere investment or short-term trade - it is a mechanism for avoiding the erosion of hard-earned economic value and propagating undiluted wealth to future generations.
As such, inheritance planning is a critical component of bitcoin ownership. However, given the relatively short existence of bitcoin as a preeminent long-term savings tool, the intricacies of bitcoin-specific estate planning have historically been an afterthought for the vast majority of bitcoin holders, as the realities of their mortality have yet to manifest in a significant manner.
As we enter bitcoin's fifth epoch, this dynamic is beginning to shift. Inheritance and estate planning are rightly becoming an increasingly important topic within the bitcoin community as holders consider the gravity of their bitcoin wealth in the context of their loved ones and heirs.
In recent months, a handful of bitcoin companies have announced "inheritance solutions" aimed at addressing these growing concerns, with almost all of them acknowledging that bitcoin inheritance is a two-fold issue:
Ensuring private keys are not mismanaged and the bitcoin itself does not become unrecoverable upon the death of its owner.
Ensuring that legal title to the bitcoin passes to the intended beneficiaries.
Unfortunately, most solutions available in the market today have predominantly focused on secure key management (issue #1), while ignoring the legal and jurisdictional realities of ownership transfer (issue #2).
Providing solutions that solve for the accessibility of the asset by named beneficiaries is not enough to protect one's bitcoin wealth. Holding access to someone's bitcoin keys doesn't give you legal title and ownership to the asset just as having a spare copy of a house key doesn't give you the deed to the house. Ensuring your bitein is not loct a mismanaged is only half of the battle - the legal title is just as important.
You can download the full report from here.