“How can you inherit cryptocurrencies when they are inherently immutable?” That’s the question Carter, a former Amazon employee, asks in a decryption on this subject on the Vox site.
This is no longer an isolated phenomenon: to date, 16% of American adults say they have already owned cryptocurrencies. Since we question their management even in divorces, the theme of their inheritance came naturally to the agenda, and some tax lawyers got down to it. But they quickly faced significant logistical difficulties, due to blockchain technology. The latter is a kind of digital ledger formed by an international online network, in which cryptocurrency transactions are recorded.
To trade on this market, there are two possibilities. One is public and works like an account number. The other is a unique, unchangeable password that cannot be recovered once lost. Pamela Morgan, author a guide to transmitting cryptocurrenciesExplain: “The law doesn’t really matter if you don’t have access to transfer those assets.”
Thus, each investor decides how he wants to pass on his crypto inheritance. Some write down the famous code on a piece of paper, which they hide in a place where their successor can find it. Others entrust the management of their inheritance to platforms like Binance Where Coinbase which make it possible to exchange assets on the Internet, a bit like the operation of traditional banks. This last technique is not the most popular. First because it can be the target of hackers. Then because it is highly paradoxical: most investors choose this market precisely because it does not involve an intermediary between the owner and his portfolio.
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They are called Safe Heaven Where House, and can develop technologies making it possible to subject access to the master key to other passwords, themselves entrusted to several different people. Supposed to facilitate transmission, these technologies sometimes make procedures even more complex.
For example, Rudy Steenhoek, an information manager based in the Netherlands, uses a strategy that could be translated as “dead man’s switch”. He gave his wife a hard drive containing a special type of password which, if used, sends a notification to Rudy. If the latter does not respond to the notification within a given time, he will be presumed dead and his wife will directly receive the information necessary to access his encrypted wallet. It may sound complicated, but the scenario where a family spends years looking for the password of a wealthy loved one in bitcoin is sadly repetitive.
The question of inheritance is not insignificant because it undermines the original libertarian ethic of cryptocurrency. She asks the investor to find the right balance: securing their assets while they are still alive while worrying about their family’s access to this cryptocurrency once they are dead.
www.slate.fr
