bitcoinafterlife
fb1c5ec4b2
3.7 KiB
REAL EXAMPLE
!!! danger "Draft — needs review before publishing" This page has not been checked against the plugin's actual behaviour. It was written from the manual's own descriptions elsewhere, which may not be complete or precise enough on their own — treat every claim below, especially about costs and timing, as unverified until confirmed with the developers or by testing directly. Do not treat it as authoritative yet.
Real-world scenarios, to make the mechanics concrete.
Inheritance across three continents, renewed for years at no cost
The setup. Four heirs, living in three different countries. A delivery time of 5 years, and several Will-Executors selected from the WeList for redundancy.
Cost at setup: zero. Both fees — the miner fee and the Will-Executor fee — are only paid once, at the moment a Will-Executor actually broadcasts the inheritance. Setting up the will, signing it, and sending it to several servers costs nothing beyond the wallet's own normal use.
Staying current costs nothing, as long as you don't push the date later. Ordinary use of the wallet — receiving funds, spending some, adding or editing an heir — makes the plugin rebuild the will automatically. Because this anticipates the delivery date by one day and redistributes it to the same Will-Executors, it is a free operation: no on-chain fee, no signature beyond the one Electrum already asks for. See Postponing vs anticipating.
!!! warning "One thing this does not do for free" Bringing forward the inheritance simply brings the date forward by one day and resends it to the Will-Executors, at no cost. If, on the other hand, you wish to maintain a fixed time horizon — "always 5 years from today", as explained in the Delivery time section — in this case the date is postponed each time it is updated. This involves postponing the date further into the future, which requires a full on-chain transaction to first invalidate the previously distributed will. This incurs a mining fee on the Bitcoin blockchain.
What this looks like over time:
- Year 0. The will is created: 5 years out, 4 heirs, several Will-Executors. Cost: 0.
- Year 1–2. The wallet is used normally — a few incoming and outgoing transactions. Each one triggers a free refresh. The delivery date itself hasn't moved, so the horizon has quietly shrunk to 3–4 years. Cost: 0.
- Year 3. Time to push the horizon back out to 5 years. This is a postponement: one small on-chain transaction to invalidate the old will before signing the new one. Cost: one miner fee, paid by the wallet owner.
- Onward. Repeat every 2–3 years — see How often to renew. Each cycle also picks up newer Will-Executors that joined the network since the last renewal.
The heirs are not involved in any way throughout this entire process. They simply need to keep their receiving wallet safe, or the sheets on which the seed is written (Bitcoin private keys, 12 or 24 words), which we will have taken care to give them if they do not already have a Bitcoin wallet or are not old enough to manage one. They do not need to know the date of the will, nor do they need to take any action: the entire mechanism operates invisibly until the day it is needed. Furthermore, they do not know how much in Bitcoin funds awaits them, unless we choose to tell them.
!!! question "Still have a question?" The FAQ answers the most common ones — costs, hardware wallets, privacy, and what happens if a Will-Executor disappears.