The wider world · 84 / 86 · 3 min
Inheritance and lost keys
If the seed is lost, the money is gone. If you die and nobody can find the seed, the money is gone. There is no probate department on the chain.
There is no desk that restores a lost seed because a family asks.
A worked case
A person keeps the seed only in their head. They die. The family has the exchange login but not the keys to the wallet. The exchange may have a process. The chain does not. The coins in the wallet stay where they are.
Lost keys
A forgotten password on a hardware wallet can be survived if the seed remains. A lost seed cannot. No company can restore a key they never held.
When you are gone
Someone you trust needs a way to reach the seed without having it today. A lawyer, a safe, a split of the words in two places. Write the instructions in plain language.
An exchange account may be claimable through the company with a death certificate. Coins in your own wallet will not be. Plan the difference.
Cotten died. The clients' coins did not become the family's.
If the seed is lost, the money is gone. If you die and nobody can find the seed, the money is gone. There is no probate department on the chain. Quadriga is the public version. Gerald Cotten died in India in December 2018. Clients could not withdraw. The OSC staff report describes what they found when they looked: a platform run as one man's business, assets that were not where customers had been told, and a mess no death certificate could unlock. Some of that was fraud, in staff's view, not merely a lost key. The lost-key part is still the part families meet when the wallet was honest and the backup was only in the dead person's head.
The New York Times stories of forgotten passwords are the living version of the same design. A device with two guesses left is not waiting for a court. A seed in a safe deposit box, with instructions a lawyer can find, is a plan. A seed in a chat with a cousin is a theft waiting for a bad year.
Write the plan while you can log in. Do not write the seed into an email to yourself and call it a plan.
Read it yourself
These links are the record. They are not a recommendation, and they are not instructions. A news story or a court paper can still be wrong about a detail. The check does not change because a famous name is in the story.
Apply the check
Open a question. The line is about this topic. It is not a verdict that anything is safe.
Nobody. That is the point of the design, and the cruelty of it.
Nobody, after the seed is gone.
The absence of the key. A sloppy backup can also stop the money by handing it to a thief.
Check yourself
Can a chain's support restore a lost seed?
No. If you held the keys and lost them, the record stays, and you cannot move it.
After this you can write down how someone you trust would reach the funds, without giving them the seed today.