PROJECT: Conquer Death with Bitcoin

[shannona]

A serious problem with any #SmartCustody solution in figuring out how to insure that your Bitcoin or other digital assets find your way to your heirs. Even if you're not dead, you might be incapacitated such that you can't personally access your funds, and it might be critically important for you to do so (say, to pay your ridiculous hospital bills in America).

We've tackled this problem twice:

• Using TImelocks — An article we wrote on the state of timelocks, concluding that they weren't ready yet for usage due to a lack of integration in bitcoin-cli (or anywhere else)
• mori-cli — An command-line program that used timelocks to protect wealth for heirs. I don't know the final state of the project.

There was also some work in our multisig self-custody scenario to try and preserve wealth for heirs, but we actually have seen pushback, suggesting that people aren't comfortable with giving up some security to maintain wealth for their family.

It would be great to get this work to a more complete stage, where it could actually be used as a reference for how to protect digital assets for heirs. We think these timelocks are a great way to do so, but they don't have to be the only solution. So, a project might involve bringing mori-cli out of the alpha stage, or updating our #SmartCustody writing if the state of bitcoin-cli has improved, or offering more solutions, or possibly putting that all together into a menu for people to choose from.