Inheritance and Bitcoins

nlocktime transactions are probably the closest thing you have at a protocol level.

Essentially, you can make a signed transaction that pays a bunch of your relatives on January 1st 2016. If you should die before then, the transaction goes through and they get their inheritance. If you are alive on December 31 2015, you would publish another transaction that invalidates the first transaction. If at this point, you want to continue with the same estate plan, you can publish another transaction for July 1st 2016 that pays out the inheritance. And again, on June 30th 2016, if you are alive you would publish another transaction that invalidates the TX about to be published on July 1st.

You can do this as long as you want and a similar transaction can be used in place of a trust (X gets some amount of bitcoins on their 21st birthday). You do have to be careful about this, as the bitcoins you're dispersing must not be moved in any way on the blockchain for the nlocktime transaction to work.

Jimmy Song

Posted 2015-11-05T03:35:21.637

Reputation: 7 067

So essentially an app which could work to constantly create and invalidate transactions as you keep spending could be used till such time the protocol itself evolves to include this functionality, thanks – skv – 2015-11-05T23:31:54.433

1Yea, this probably isn't appropriate for a protocol level intervention. You can have software that does this pretty seamlessly. Actually might take a stab at making something =) – Jimmy Song – 2015-11-05T23:33:16.547

Actually yes this specific method isnt appropriate at protocol level, happy that my question made you think in this direction – skv – 2015-11-05T23:36:51.517

This is clever. Did you end up writing such a tool? – shx2 – 2016-10-20T09:12:55.027

One small detail I think you missed: "If you should die before then, the transaction goes through" -- somebody still needs to have access to the tx and publish it after the lock-time. You can't publish it beforehand and rely on miners to store it for you. – shx2 – 2016-10-20T09:15:18.937

2This idea and others have been explored. Look into smart contracts. – m1xolyd1an – 2015-11-05T04:23:34.120

– Murch – 2015-11-05T11:12:28.183

Answers for inheritance are already posted at

– skaht – 2015-11-06T05:06:20.313

@skaht: That's the same question I also linked. :) – Murch – 2015-11-06T14:49:08.277

@Murch - I concur about http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/38692/estate-planning-how-can-i-ensure-my-bitcoins-are-inheritable/38729#38729, I had a very close call where died for 18 minutes 18 days ago while bicycling. If the quadruple bypass did not succeed, "Points for Cold Wallet Inheritability" would have been exercised. Long story short, no need for lawyers for beneficiaries to inherit cryptocurrencies when using BIP 38 and Shamir's Shared Secret properly.

– skaht – 2016-05-07T11:49:16.593