But good luck finding someone you can trust to actually handle the money once they have the key.
Unless, this is what you meant by "split" in which case I agree.
> To unlock the secret via Shamir's secret sharing, a minimum number of shares are needed. This is called the threshold, and is used to denote the minimum number of shares needed to unlock the secret. An adversary who discovers any number of shares less than the threshold will not have any additional information about the secured secret-- this is called perfect secrecy. In this sense, SSS is a generalisation of the one-time pad (which is effectively SSS with a two-share threshold and two shares in total).
[1]: https://pimbook.org/
You can connect to obituary oracle on chainlink and release data to prespecified law firm upon proof of death. Then make sure the law firm validates the death before opening. Wallets and Keys inside. Or secret pass phrases inside.
Yes, ironic that digital currency is being protected by physical bank, but that's really stretching for something to be haha. It's SOP for banks really.
Fiat money is uniquely susceptible to repressive governments in a way that nothing was when people actually thought about countering those in a practical way, and bank transfers are even more so—see today’s news from Canada for an example that’s chilling whether or not you agree with the actual politics in play. That needs to be fixed, I think. It could be fixed by making money more resilient to government intervention or by making governments less likely to make malicious interventions, probably both. These approaches, and even approaches to these approaches, have different implications, so history will have to find the balance, but I’d be loath to just dismiss the former out of hand.
But death is a thing that needs human interpretation, at least for the foreseeable future, and thus those arguments don’t apply here. The current banking and actuarial system isn’t that insane for the most part, for a system that has to operate under the constraint of needing human interpretation. It’s just that I refuse to stop thinking about the extent to which such a constraint is actually present in any particular situation. In strongbox rental, it is. Great! And I say that as someone with an experience of withdrawing the contents of a safe deposit box from a branch of a failing bank, on the day before the doors of said branch were locked and tagged.
(Nothing about a strongbox rental business even needs to be connected with loans or securities in any way, it’s just that banks sort of organically grew both functions. No problem with that, but also no problem with somebody dissatisfied with any aspect of modern macroeconomics having no gripes against safe deposit boxes.)
It’s effectively backloading risk onto the very things claimed to be outmoded and replaceable.
The risk is very low, but it is present.
See: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...
If you haven't shared it with anyone, why would anyone get it?
If you didn't trust anyone with the keys to it while you were alive, why should anyone have it?
Wills and inheritance have been a part of human society since the beginning of civilization, I think it’s more likely we will need to find a way to make new technology adapt to society and not the other way around
In a sense, due to the deflationary nature of most crypto, dying without telling anyone what the key to your wallet is, is equivalent to redistributing all your funds to everyone in a way that is proportional to the amount everybody already owns. So it's kinda regressive, which seems to align well with the current crypto political climate...
Besides, "how do I ensure my wife and/or children get my wealth when I die" is a question humans have been addressing for thousands of years. Only a bitcoiner could be so nihilist to not care.
I feel like the people I know who are most enthusiastic about Bitcoin are the ones who care most about generational wealth and the long-term mindset. There are tons of ways to establish backups for family members (multi signature wallets, time locked wallets.)
... but can't rip me off a second earlier.
What do you mean, what's wrong? Everything is wrong.
If I have children, I absolutely want them to inherit everything I own when I die. I want them to use it all to reach even further than I have and be more successful and richer than I was. This is how wealth is built across generations.
I don't want my money to be forever lost in the unimaginably large cryptographic search space. I certainly don't want my money to go to anyone other than my children, especially the government.
This is the wrong model, technically it causes micro deflation that would be similar to distributing it to everyone weighted by their current amount. The rich get richer-er (in an absolute sense, but not in a proportional sense).
The effect is probably minuscule on a case by case basis, but if it were happening on nation scale it might make a difference.
Surely you wouldn’t think it’s absurd to expect that if someone dies with some extra food, that other people ought to make use of that food, even if they hadn’t made a formal last will.
When a pile of "capital" is destroyed (i.e. a bushel of wheat spoils, or a factory burns to the ground, or the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody are somehow lost forever) then this is a loss to society in general and to the owner of that "capital" in particular. If a pile of "money" is destroyed (i.e. Pablo Escobar burns $2MM in currency, private key to crypto wallet is lost) there is no corresponding loss of real physical "capital". There is simply a reduction in aggregate outstanding claims against the unchanged real physical "capital". So the unaffected holders of the other claims see their purchasing power increase, i.e. they no longer have to outbid the person whose "money" was destroyed, they have now "cut out" the loser from claims against "capital".
Well, at least one of these examples is actually capital (the factory). Of the remainder, one is just plain property, not a capital good, and the other is information. Capital is property which serves as a means of production. Sometimes the term is used loosely to include highly marketable goods (money) which can stand in for the means of production (e.g. "raising capital"), or even more loosely as in "human capital" (referring to the capacity for labor as a means of production), but it does not include commodities consumed in the production process, such as the wheat; nor information, which is non-rivalrous and thus not property, much less capital.
With that said, you're basically correct about the difference between currency other forms of property—goods with utility beyond their use in trade. For the most part there is no advantage to society in having a larger or smaller amount of currency (in aggregate). For economic calculation it's best if the supply just remains constant; any variation will temporarily affect the allocation of other resources, but eventually the value of the currency will adjust so that the total purchasing power of the currency equals all the goods available for purchase. It can cause problems if the supply changes too rapidly, making prices unstable, or if so much currency is lost that it starts to impact divisibility. For example, if bitcoins grew in value to the point where one satoshi was worth a month of labor we would need to modify the protocol to add more significant digits, or introduce a parallel system for day-to-day transactions, much like silver vs. gold.
That would depend on who gets to decide what counts as "a good cause". I can think of worse ways the purchasing power could be employed than distributing it widely among other users of the currency. Even assuming the best of intentions, you're still directing resources rather arbitrarily away from other goals in favor of the selected cause, which is not necessarily a net benefit to society.
In general it makes sense to follow the wishes of the deceased, if they are known—it serves no good purpose to distinguish between gifts made just before death vs. ones made at the time of death via a will, and doing so penalizes those who die unexpectedly before making their bequests. Beyond that, I see no reason why relatives of the deceased should have an automatic claim in the absence of a will—but their claim is stronger at least than any the state might make, so given the choice I'd rather see the property go to the heirs than the state. Personally, though, in the absence of a will I would just consider the property abandoned and available for anyone to freely use and thus claim for themselves via homesteading. In some cases that process may have already begun—for example, if the owner of a house dies without leaving a will then anyone else who was already living there (presumably the deceased's family) would have priority to assume ownership once the deceased's claim was abandoned. Their prior investment in the home didn't matter as long as it had an owner, but with that owner gone it should count in their favor for the homesteading process.
Yes, but the dependency on what counts as a good cause also applies to distributing wealth indiscriminately among all holders of a currency.
"Capital" is the wrong word here. It doesn't include non-productive, consumable goods such as food, but it can include money as a stand-in for means of production. It doesn't make sense to contrast "capital" with "money" when what you really mean is "all goods which are not money".
In any case, the difference is utility. The value of money is (almost) entirely derived from its use in trade; it's not consumed and it doesn't directly serve as a means of production. If a factory burns down or food spoils then society is poorer for it, but if the amount of money in existence decreases then nothing of value is lost, provided it affects everyone holding currency equally. (In the case of someone dying the only one not affected equally is the deceased, who isn't around to object to the loss and thus doesn't count.) We still have all the consumable goods and means of production which we had before, and the purchasing power of the remaining currency will adjust to compensate for the change in the money supply.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadriga_Fintech_Solutions
I recall reading at one point about future support for time locked multisig in Bitcoin that could maybe help with that but don't know the status of that capability or how it works, or how difficult it is to set up.
Seeing the challenge in this, I made a note for my wife which is "All of our nerd stuff, if I die" It contains instructions on how our network works, how to handle domain names, how our backup system works, etc. Passwords and such belong to our shared BitWarden, but for all the other "What now?" stuff, I feel better having given her at least some explanation.
One option would be to create a multi-signature wallet, where for example three keys exist, while two keys are needed for transactions. This would allow scenarios where the widow and the notary can access a wallet after the owner died. At the same time, no single party would be able to run with the money with only one key.
Cotten was treating all customer deposits as ostensibly a single asset pool, paying expenses and customer withdrawals out of the same pot, using that same pot to speculate on bitcoin on external exchanges, and using fake accounts to boost volume or liquidity. When Bitcoin crashed in 2017 he had way more BTC and way less CAD than his customers were owed and had paid much more for it than he could sell it for. It was a classic Ponzi scheme. Add in all of the money he had spent on personal assets out of the same pot and there is no need to speculate about a mythical missing wallet. They found 4 paper cold wallets and all of them were empty, presumably because the contents had been sold to pay other customers.
Just to add to this, we haven't even scratched the surface of what's possible with shared/collaborative custody and timelocks.
Look up “unclaimed property”, there is a whole complicated bureaucracy dedicated to tracking this stuff and letting heirs claim it. Each state of the US has a separate web site where you can search for anything left in a dead relative’s accounts.
Claiming it is easy for small values. It gets more complicated as the value rises, I have enough left in this situation from a grandparent that I am putting off getting something called a “judgement of possession” to acquire some funds.
This bureaucracy does not, of course, exist for cryptobucks; creating one probably will be mandatory if it is to become an actual part of the financial system instead of a cascading pile of scams, and it will involve a whole lot of things that are anathema to the anti-government attitudes a lot of crypto true believers have.
The short answer is inheritance happens. If there's no co-signers, named beneficiaries, will or heirs, the state will eventually appoint an executor who will settle any outstanding debts of the estate against the account, and then I think the state itself is the ultimate inheritor.
Most states have a notion of "unclaimed funds", and you can check to see if you have any money sitting in the state coffers from a dead relative or a settlement.
My favorite conceptually is a dead-man switch. For example, something will have a password only you have, as long as you input you are alive every x days. If you die, eventually it switches to another password someone else might have.
It really is amazing to think how hard it is to keep something safe, once you are tasked with it.
(i'm sure there are many many others, please add yours as a reply!)
the contract could be written such that if two or more checkins in a row are missed, then the assets can be withdrawn by any authorized users.
This is very important. Due to strong cryptography it's safe to assume the cryptocurrencies can't be moved without the secret key. What happens if the owner of the key dies? My father asked me about this once and I had no answer. Something to really think about.
We currently think of secret keys as expendable. Compromised or lost? Just make a new one. Nobody shares or inherits keys, everyone has their own set. The dead won't be encrypting or signing any messages and there is generally no reason for anyone to retain the ability to impersonate them.
Traditional key discipline relies on the assumption keys are worth nothing. All this goes out the window when these are the keys to assets worth thousands, millions. A new key discipline needs to be developed.