The coins dying with him are actually the best case scenario for all other holders.
"Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone." - Satoshi Nakamoto
You can even split up your key in an M of N format so that a) no single compromised location causes loss, and b) some number of storage locations can be lost without losing your key.
Can you do that with gold? Land? Art? Cash? Bonds? Stocks? All of these rely on either securing a single location where the wealth is stored and moving to another place is either expensive, risky, or necessarily impossible (land/buildings), and/or they rely on trusting some custodian to preserve your claim on that wealth.
Is this going to be one of this discussion where people try to pretend banks haven't existed for centuries and work very well for pretty much everyone?
Banks are example of what more-less people want from their currency. And crypto should be taking notes from CENTURIES of experiences. And not just shun it all and start from scratch.
Loosing keys to wallet is huge problem for ubiquity of crypto, and as a currency of the future it might be fatal flaw. If someone steals my IRL wallet, I call bank to cancel my cards and cry a bit about lost cash and hustle of getting all ID's etc back. If I loose crypto wallet, its gone all of it. Without proper precautions of multiple wallets and safeguards you risk loosing all your wealth in accident or robbery without much to do about it.
It's not a secret. Immutability is one of the key features and regularly advertised part of the system. So much so that when that irreconcilability is violated (e.g. rolling back the DAO hack in Ethereum) it's seen as a negative.
There might be some morons who didn't do any research before investing, but they won't be a huge loss if they sell out and stay out.
I think you're underestimating the size of this group.
The currency is digital. If the current smallest unit is worth too much, then we can just increase the decimal places.
Bitcoin is not like gold where its limited supply makes it infeasible as a currency for a large number of people because the size of the coins for everyday purchases would be too small to physically handle (hence the concurrent use of less value dense silver).
Given the current loss/mining rate its totally possible for BTC to become difficult to operate, but its also possible for the mining cap to be removed or for coins to be split further.
Also, there is already a trick on the lightning network to trade sub satoshis without requiring a hardfork, probabilistic payments, https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2017/project/7.pdf
It actually matters with bitcoin because of the hard supply cap. Every lost coin shrinks the pie.
Printing money and giving it away causes inflation because people can use it to buy things but having money printed but locked away does nothing. If this money was locked up then its not much of a change.
Which one would you choose?
One of the disadvantages of crypto, I suppose, is that people could gang up and hard fork against any arbitrary billionaire even if they were alive.
This isn't unique to crypto. People have literally been ganging up against powerful individuals since pre history. Hell, it's common in the animal world. Young male lions often gang up to oust the old alpha and take over his pride.
And beyond that, our current legal system can go after any arbitrary person much more easily than it would be for the entire world to consent to hard forking to target a single individual.
You don't know what it takes to do a fork of bitcoin. Many have tried, none have succeeded.
For example, all of the following must be true:
* Zero Github commits in a week
* Zero Facebook or Instagram posts in a week
* Zero e-mail outbox messages in a week
* Zero smart devices switched on/off in a week
* Zero outgoing phone calls in a week
etc
One, I think a week is too short, as another person has already said. I'm planning a week vacation soon and want to be unplugged the entire time. Also, while rare, I can imagine a natural disaster could last longer than a week and the last thing I want to worry about is making sure I send a few emails.
Second, I'm curious why you want so many conditions to be true before the trigger? I've seen services (and I've thought of setting up a simple self-hosted option) that simply email you a link on a predefined cadence and all you have to do is click the link. In order to protect against some weird spam filtering, I'm thinking a text message or Discord message could also be sent. The odds of both breaking for a month I think is rare. Why might I also want Github commits and phone calls to be checked?
If I would forget to click a link, it's either because I'm super busy with work, in which there will be multiple Github commits per day, OR it's because I'm enjoying a vacation, in which my social media might be more active.
I have been away from technology but not for more than 2 weeks at a time. I suppose just s/week/month/ or whatever.
I’d be careful to multi factor data decryption, the encrypted data must be released and some party you trust who isn’t likely to die with you holds a decryption code
Then you don't need complex technical triggers.
Just use something like Dashlane. People can report you dead, and then you have up until your specified waiting period to mark yourself as not actually dead. If Dashlane goes out of business you'd need a new provider, but as long as you don't die within a month or so of your password manager then you're set. Much better than writing your own.
Also, you're almost certainly going to outlive Dashlane.
That's an accident waiting to happen.
That would mean putting themselves in great danger.
Eg. The hashed list of emails. It's going to be a hard reality check if some of your "friends" don't have access to their emails anymore or just aren't friends anymore after x years. The amount he suggests is 7, which is insanely much. Even people have issues with their parents with money alone.
It's a nice fantasy though, but not workable in reality.
So it's not that hard to distribute several keys of the multisig to various heirs, who would have to agree on any transfers of funds. Another option is to keep each key in a different safe deposit box, with a will stating who gets access to the boxes.