Bitcoin and cryptocurrency owners should have an inheritance plan in place as soon as possible to avoid these assets from being lost forever, experts said. Whether choosing to draw a treasure map, put a key in an envelope, or create a digital inheritance plan, it is extremely important that a will is created for passing down digital assets to future generations.
“When you’re thinking long term with your Bitcoin, you need to take into account the potential that you might pass away,” said Nick Neuman, CEO of Casa. “So it is important to plan for your family or whoever else you want to receive your Bitcoin, if and when that happens.”
He was speaking at a panel discussion about inheritance planning for cryptocurrency at the Bitcoin Mena conference, which began in Abu Dhabi on Monday. He said that a lot of people put off doing it for a long time. “We have tried to make it as simple as possible at Casa. You can do it in literally five minutes. And that lowers the barrier to setting up something so critical, but people don’t like thinking about it.”
Other panelists said that it was important to give technical as well as non-technical ways for heirs to inherit Bitcoin and other digital assets.
From the technical side, you want to make sure that you can give your heirs keys that they can use at a later date,” said Ben Kaufman, from Bitcoin Keeper. “So it allows us to give certain keys that are activating at certain times or in certain scenarios. That is the approach we’re taking right now. From the non-technical side, we try to give a letter to the attorney or letter to heirs. This is to help your attorney know how to help give away the inheritance or how to let your heirs know how to access it.”
Kevin Loaec from Wizardsardine added that the biggest challenge was to share their private key with their family. “You can put it in an envelope and just write ‘do not open this before I die,'” he said. “But you are fully trusting that your family will not steal your money, and will keep the key as well as you would do. And that is a big assumption because they might not know how much money it’s worth. They might not know anything about Bitcoin. This could compromise your backup. So that would completely destroy your family basically because you wouldn’t trust each other, which is catastrophic. So from the security perspective, this is exactly the thing to avoid. Never share a private key with anyone.”
Nick shared that his company had helped several people to recover the digital assets of a family member who died unexpectedly. “In all the cases we were successful, simply because the family had the needed keys and documents, but it was a year-long process and required us to get the courts involved,” he said. “But we were lucky in these cases. So it’s worth spending five to 10 minutes to actually get it set up and then spending like 30 minutes to an hour to have the conversation with your family to help them understand what the deal is and what’s going on.”
Source: www.khaleejtimes.com
