An example of a proper succession plan with Bitcoin¶
A concrete, start-to-finish walkthrough of how someone actually sets up a Bitcoin inheritance with BAL — and keeps it current for years without spending anything.
Step by step¶
Start from Electrum. You use Electrum, a state-of-the-art Bitcoin wallet with one of the longest security track records in the ecosystem. BAL builds on it rather than reinventing the wallet.
Add a hardware wallet (optional). If you want, pair Electrum with a hardware device to raise the security of your keys even further. BAL works the same either way — Electrum still does all the signing.
You have funds to protect. You hold bitcoin in Electrum that, in case of an accident, death, or a lost seed, should reach your children — or simply a backup wallet of your own.
Install the BAL plugin. Add Bitcoin After Life to Electrum. See Installation.
Set up the inheritance with the guided wizard. BAL walks you through the whole thing step by step — see Create your first will.
Add your heirs and their shares. Enter how many heirs receive the funds and the share for each. To avoid future disputes, equal shares for everyone are usually the wisest choice.
Choose the delivery date. For example 5 or 10 years from now.
The plugin builds the post-dated transaction. It includes the fee for the miners and for the Will-Executors — the servers that hold the will until the chosen date and, on that day, broadcast it to the Bitcoin nodes that will accept the transaction.
Setting up and updating a will costs nothing
You pay no fee to create or update an inheritance. The fees exist only in the transaction itself and are paid only if and when the inheritance is actually executed.
Renew it once a year or two. Mark it in your calendar. When you renew — adding an heir, changing shares — the plugin rewrites the inheritance transaction and re-sends it to the Will-Executors dated one day earlier, so you avoid an on-chain transaction and any mining fee. Renewing regularly brings two real advantages:
- More redundancy — each renewal can pick up additional Will-Executors that will hold your will until the delivery date.
- Future-proofing — a fresh time-locked transaction can incorporate future Bitcoin protocol upgrades, such as quantum-resistant security, as they arrive.
Using your wallet normally¶
Setting up an inheritance does not freeze your wallet — you keep using Electrum as usual.
If you receive or spend funds after the will is set up, the next time you close Electrum the BAL plugin checks your balance (by inspecting your UTXOs) and warns you if the inheritance needs updating.
Here too the plugin anticipates the date by one day. So a will set to execute on 30 July 2031 is reissued for 29 July 2031 — with no need to write anything on-chain and no miner fee. This works because an earlier time-locked transaction automatically invalidates the later one it replaces.
Why anticipating is free, and postponing is not
Moving the date earlier (anticipating) is free, because the new transaction simply supersedes the old one. Moving the date later (postponing) is the one case that needs a real on-chain transaction, and therefore a small miner fee. For the full mechanics see Keeping the will up to date.
Still have a question?
The FAQ answers the most common ones — costs, hardware wallets, privacy, and what happens if a Will-Executor disappears.