What happens to your crypto if you’re dead?
15th March 2021 |
What have you got planned for your crypto when you’re dead?
Have you even asked yourself that question?
You should. You need to. You must ensure there’s some backstop for your crypto wealth if you’re either dead or incapacitated to the extent you can’t function properly.
Sombre thoughts to have. But necessary.
You see most people don’t realise how important this is.
Take my own situation for example. Some time ago, my wife said to me that she had no idea how to access my hardware wallets. If I was dead, there’s no way she’d be able to access our crypto holdings.
That crypto wealth would be lost forever. Neither her nor my kids would be able to access it.
That’s since changed, of course. It’s meant ensuring that if the time ever came where she needed to access them, there are instructions to follow to access it all. Not only that, if she needs help, there are a couple of people she knows she can turn to for a bit of technical assistance.
That’s probably the most important point about it all. It’s ensuring that your estate can access your accounts, but also that there is a trusted person for technical assistance in helping them to take the right steps to access it.
The whole thing around estate planning got me thinking.
You see, on Thursday a friend of mine asked if I could help him with some Ethereum he had. He’d got it back in 2017 (before the 2017/18 boom) and now it was worth several times more than when he first got it.
The only thing is how he had it…
His Ethereum was on a public address, he had the public key, he had the private key. Therefore, he had Ethereum. However, all the information was just on a secured Word document.
Now, that’s not exactly the safest way to store crypto, but it was effective enough. Still, it meant he had no way of sending it from one place to another, if he wanted to sell it, he didn’t know what to do.
He really just wanted to get it into his Coinbase account so he at least could access it and do what he wanted with it.
Hence, he enlisted my help to get access to his wallet.
I walked him through step by step about using his private key to recover the wallet through a simple-to-use crypto application. In this case, I got him to import the account to TrustWallet, and then send it to his Coinbase account.
To me, that’s really easy. But to him, it was a lot, far too complicated and he just didn’t have the confidence to know what to do.
This is why I want to ask you something…
Would you pay for some help?
I’ve been toying with this idea for a while. But I figured the best way to figure out if it’s a good idea or not is to just ask.
My idea is for me to provide a service which provides technical assistance to an estate for crypto estate planning.
It would mean that if your estate needed help to access a wallet, to move crypto from a place to another, to set up accounts with exchanges, to trade back to fiat money or to other crypto, I could help.
What it wouldn’t mean is storing any passwords, private keys, seed phrases or anything like that. I’d never want, nor ask, for access to anything like that.
It would simply mean sitting down with an estate and helping them to access crypto wealth and then facilitate their decisions as to what to do next.
Of course, that kind of thing is never easy, never a ten minute conversation, and would take some time on my part to ensure things were done right. But at least you’d have the reassurance that your estate would have someone to help them with no ulterior motives.
So my question is simple.
Do you think a service like that is something you’d be interested in? A service which requires a one-off payment which would mean your estate can call on me (in the event of your death or incapacity) in proving, of course, death or incapacity with the required information and I’d help them work through the crypto wealth.
It’s a bit of a bespoke service, but one nonetheless I think is valuable.
If you think it’s a good idea – can you let me know? Send me an email to [email protected] with the subject “Crypto Estate Planning”.
In doing so, let me know how much you think would be a suitable one-off payment for such a service. Realistically, I don’t know what to value it at, so your guidance there would help too.
Anyway, let me know what you think. If enough people like it and think it’s a good idea, we’ll look to do something. If no one responds, then I’ll bin the idea!
However, as mentioned, hopefully I’ve now at least got you thinking about your estate planning when it comes to crypto.
It’s not like your bank where you can just cough up a death certificate and probate and away you go. You are your own bank in crypto – so when the bank is dead, what you going to do?
It’s a big area of crypto that not enough people think about, talk about, or plan for. Most people don’t even properly do anything about it in the traditional system, so I can only imagine how poorly people take care of it in crypto.
Admittedly, for a long time I didn’t take it seriously either. But I have now, and I think you should too.
NFT mania – be careful
I also wanted to touch on the recent mania surrounding the non-fungible tokens (NFT) space. You might hear about NFTs in the mainstream. You might have people trying to flog you NFT artwork. You might be FOMOing into the NFT space yourself.
What I would suggest is to be very careful.
NFTs are an area of crypto that is important, but right now it is being carried by hype and a great deal of misinformation.
Mainly because a lot of digital art is being sold as NFTs and attracting wild prices. The $69 million Beeple NFT was even on the front of the Wall Street Journal. NFTs have hit the mainstream indeed!
This isn’t my first rodeo when it comes to NFTs. They kicked off in 2017 with the rise of CryptoKitties. These were collectible digital cats you could breed, buy and sell – commanding crazy valuations too.
Most are worthless. And it’s a reminder that scarcity does not automatically equate to value. Rubbish art will always be rubbish art. A lot of the NFTs commanding huge prices aren’t necessarily artistically significant.
There’s a good argument to suggest that a lot of the inflated prices are wash-trading between accounts that are related just to artificially inflate prices.
Also, just because something is expensive, does not automatically make it valuable.
My point here is there’s a lot to like about the NFT space. In fact, there’s far more to it than just artwork. It’s a topic I’ll be diving into more in your next update, so keep an eye out for that.
But just be careful, a lot of the NFTs commanding huge prices now will be worth fractions of their value later. Some will be great purchases, some won’t. It’s subjective, and it’s definitely in a hype and FOMO phase right now.
Don’t get overly sucked into it. What I would also suggest is listening to my interview that I did with Joe Lubin from 31 October 2018. You’ll find the interview in your subscriber login, under the Frontier Tech Investor “Media” section, here.
In it there’s a section where we talk about NFTs,
SV I know with under Consensus you’ve got like Gnosis and AirSwap and Grid+, so the diversity of projects…
JL And 45 others.
SV Yes, just to name a couple, right? The diversity of what’s building on Ethereum, how do you see that ecosystem. Do you see it as another version of the internet or do you see it as a layer on top of the internet?
JL So, a natural progression of the internet protocols and the web protocols. We call it Web 3 as a sort of umbrella term. And it’s a new trust foundation layer. So Web 3, the decentralised web, will essentially be lots of decentralised protocols that all interoperate relatively fluently with one another. So there will be Ethereum and there will be probably some other networks that do similar things to Ethereum. And that’s basically trusted transactions, automated agreements, smart software objects.
The ability to create digitally scare assets. So that’s pretty profound. But we’ll need decentralised storage and decentralised bandwidth and decentralised heavy compute and proof of location, and decentralised identity and many of those…
SV So those particular things, decentralised storage, identity, do you see that as the sort of critical element to taking that next step for the wider network?
JL Not the critical element, one of thousands that are being built on. So we have fungible tokens, non-fungible tokens, tokenised securities, atomic swap protocols, decentralised exchanges, centralised exchanges, identity reputation.
Digitally scare assets, an important distinction from just “NFTs” – because then we do start talking about things like identity and proof of location which have huge potential in a decentralised world.
Anyway, keep an eye out in your next fortnightly Sam Volkering’s Crypto Network update for more on NFTs and how you can look to get involved in the space in a more confident and reassured way.
Crypto to Know
Finally for today, a question I’ve been getting a lot is: why isn’t IOTA in the Crypto to Know section?
Well the reason is because IOTA is listed in our Frontier Tech Investor portfolio as an active recommendation. Hence, it’s assumed to be a Crypto to Know, because we’ve got it as an active buy recommendation.
But perhaps that’s confusing for people. And perhaps some people aren’t ready to take action on IOTA and instead want to just get to know it more before making any decisions.
In that case, make sure to read and review the full IOTA recommendation which is contained in the report, “Tesla’s Final Prophecy: The World Brain”.
Also make sure to reference the “Ultimate Starters Guide to Crypto” which again details how IOTA is different than other crypto and why it doesn’t use a blockchain like others.
If you just want to know more about IOTA, I’d suggest heading to the IOTA Foundation site, looking through its “Docs” section and absorbing the information there.
And hence, for what it’s worth, you’ll also now find IOTA in our Crypto to Know list below.
“Crypto to Know” watchlist
- Bitcoin
- Ethereum
- IOTA
- Tezos
- Uniswap & 1inch
- Filecoin
Until next time,
Sam Volkering
Editor, Sam Volkering’s Crypto Network
