Inheritance

In March 2013, dying of ALS, Hal Finney typed a farewell post with eye-tracking software. The man who received the first bitcoin transaction ever sent described, among the things he was proudest of, the state of his affairs: his coins were in a safe deposit box, his son and daughter were tech-savvy and knew what to do, and he considered them safe enough — he was, he wrote, comfortable with his legacy. It is the only famous bitcoin death story with a happy ending, and notice what made it one: nothing clever. The heirs knew the coins existed, knew where the access lived, and had the competence to act. Every inheritance disaster since — and several million coins are already stranded in them — is missing at least one of those three sentences.

The problem is structural, so state it structurally. Bitcoin is a bearer asset with no recovery desk: Module 1's great feature — nobody can move your coins without your keys — becomes, at your death, the estate's great hazard, because nobody can move your coins without your keys. No probate court, no exchange support line, no locksmith. Whatever your heirs cannot find and operate, the network keeps forever. Inheritance planning is therefore not a legal nicety bolted onto custody; it is the final load-bearing wall of the custody itself.

The governing principle is the one that runs the whole school: separate knowledge from access. Your heirs need to know three things — that the bitcoin exists, where the instructions live, and who to trust — and they need to know them before you die. What they must not have, while you live, is the ability to spend. The instrument is the sealed letter: a document that names what exists and where the pieces are, in household references a stranger cannot use, and never contains a seed word, passphrase, or PIN. It sits with the will or the lawyer. Found by a burglar, it is a treasure map to steel plates in places he cannot reach; found by your executor, it is the whole plan.

Cast the people deliberately. A lead person — usually the executor — runs the plan; a technical helper — someone who understands bitcoin and owes you honesty — keeps the lead person from being rushed or fooled; the beneficiaries receive. Two rules from the failure files: the helper and the lead should not be the same person as any single key holder, or you have quietly rebuilt the single point of failure; and every one of them must be told, in writing, that no legitimate party ever asks for seed words — because scammers read obituaries, and grief is the most phishable state a human enters.

The mechanics scale with your setup. For single-sig: the letter points to the steel, and — if Module 4's trade was taken — to the separately stored passphrase, without which the heirs inherit a decoy. For multisig: the estate must recover M keys and the descriptor and the understanding, so the letter's multisig section lists every key location and where the descriptor copies live; a well-built 2-of-3 can even include an heir or lawyer as a keyholder who cannot spend alone today but completes a quorum at the succession. What the mechanics must never include: seed words in the will — wills become public documents in probate — or the "simple" plan of telling nobody anything, which is item nine on Module 8's list.

Then do the thing almost nobody does: rehearse it. Sit down once with the lead person and walk the plan end to end — find the letter, locate every reference, confirm each piece is where the document claims. A plan that has never been walked is a hope with a wax seal, exactly as an untested backup was in Module 3. Then review annually, because Module 8's twelfth failure mode applies with full force here: people drift, houses change, helpers move abroad. The printable worksheet attached to this module is the working document — fill it in by hand, seal it, and give your family the ending Hal Finney gave his.