I observe there's a certain prejudice, in that law is written by the living.
The other ideas of cryptocurrency/escrow/private keys would escape the law... until you tried to spend it legally. You might as well bury gold in a chest.
[...] I don't know what this great think I'm meant to be doing is, and it looks to me as if I was supposed not to know. And I resent that, right?
"The old me knew. The old me cared. Fine, so far so hoopy. Except that the old me cared so much that he actually got inside his own brain - my own brain - and locked off the bits that knew and cared, because if I knew and cared I wouldn't be able to do it. I wouldn't be able to go and be President, and I wouldn't be able to steal this ship, which must be the important thing.
"But this former self of mine killed himself off, didn't he, by changing my brain? OK, that was his choice. This new me has its own choices to make, and by a strange coincidence those choices involve not knowing and not caring about this big number, whatever it is. That's what he wanted, that's what he got.
"Except this old self of mine tried to leave himself in control, leaving orders for me in the bit of my brain he locked off. Well, I don't want to know, and I don't want to hear them. That's my choice. I'm not going to be anybody's puppet, particularly not my own."
Zaphod banged the console in fury, oblivious to the dumbfolded looks he was attracting.
"The old me is dead!" he raved, "Killed himself! The dead shouldn't hang about trying to interfere with the living!"
Uploads aren’t even the biggest worry. If it turned out to be possible to upload analyse and upload personalities, it would also become possible to synthesize new personalities on demand to a required spec.
How much value does organic personality actually have?
Until the "dead" uploads outnumber the living, at which point they vote in a bloc to expropriate and enslave the meat-humans, as in the novel The Uploaded.
A. thanks for the suggestion, great, terrific, wonderful (was flux good?) but B. The dead shouldn't hang about trying to interfere with the living!
And of course let everyone know that's the case beforehand!
Edit: I read the article. So they are assuming in the future that they won't bother making a new human, but just load the brain state into a computer simulation, which would be even cheaper.
Could a computer host a human mind to its full capacity?
I guess they could just kill you again. But would the threat of that happening in the future deter you from lying at time of death, when you have nothing else to lose?
It seems like there would need to be system of proving possession of a password that would have to last 100 years. I have not thought through this kind of scenario (sorry!). Perhaps this has been considered before by those studying the problem in detail (e.g. science fiction authors)? What are the solutions?
It is debatable whether known public-key cryptography systems will survive attack for the amount of time under discussion here.
I suspect the hack will be to extract the secret from the brain being resurrected, recover the funds, and toss the brain in the trash.
Why bother resurrecting you fully?
You don't want to be the first but you want to be the tenth or so. Once the process takes off all the bounties will drastically lose their worth because such technology will likely disrupt a lot of what humans place value on.
If you really want to make it stringent, make the bounty require a password that only that (deceased) person knows. Best case scenario they do such a good job resurrecting you that you still remember the password, or at worst there's an incentive to picking the fact out of your brain, which might be only slightly less difficult than doing the full resurrection.