Add blog post: What Can a Will-Executor Actually See?
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<title>What Can a Will-Executor Actually See? Privacy in the BAL Protocol — Bitcoin After Life</title>
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<meta name="description" content="A Will-Executor holds one signed, time-locked transaction — nothing else. Exactly what it can see, what it cannot, and why privacy here comes from architecture, not from a policy.">
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<span class="eyebrow">Blog</span>
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<h1>What Can a Will-Executor Actually See? Privacy in the BAL Protocol</h1>
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<div class="post-meta">
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<time datetime="2026-09-06">6 September 2026</time>
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<span class="dot"></span>
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<span translate="no">Bitcoin After Life</span>
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<span class="dot"></span>
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<span>4 min read</span>
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<figure>
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<img src="img/what-a-will-executor-can-see-cover.webp" width="1600" height="900" loading="lazy" alt="A blue shield bearing the Bitcoin symbol covers an eye in front of a document — what a Will-Executor can and cannot see">
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</figure>
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<p>When you hand something to a third party — even an automated one — the first question a careful Bitcoiner asks is: <em>what do they learn about me?</em></p>
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<p>It's the right question. Traditional inheritance is a privacy disaster by design: a notary learns your identity, your family structure, your assets, and your heirs' identities, and all of it ends up in records that can be subpoenaed, leaked, or — in many jurisdictions — made public after probate. Custodial services are worse: they hold your coins <em>and</em> your data.</p>
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<p><span translate="no">Bitcoin After Life</span> was built to need no third party at all. But it does involve Will-Executor servers, so let's answer the privacy question precisely, without marketing fog: <strong>here is exactly what a Will-Executor can see, and what it cannot.</strong></p>
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<h2>What a Will-Executor holds</h2>
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<p>A Will-Executor stores one thing: your <strong>signed, time-locked inheritance transaction</strong>. Nothing else travels to the server — no identity, no email, no account, no documents. The BAL plugin doesn't ask who you are, because the protocol doesn't need to know.</p>
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<p>From that transaction, an executor — like anyone who inspects a raw Bitcoin transaction — can technically observe:</p>
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<ul style="padding-left:22px">
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<li><strong>The inputs:</strong> the specific UTXOs your inheritance will spend, and therefore the amount they contain.</li>
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<li><strong>The outputs:</strong> your heirs' addresses, their shares, and the executor fee.</li>
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<li><strong>The locktime:</strong> the delivery date after which the transaction becomes valid.</li>
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</ul>
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<p>That is the complete list. Let's now look at the much longer list of what remains invisible.</p>
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<h2>What a Will-Executor cannot see</h2>
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<p><strong>Your identity.</strong> There is no account system, no KYC, no registration. To a Will-Executor you are a transaction, not a person. Bitcoin addresses are pseudonymous by design — the server sees strings of characters, not names.</p>
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<p><strong>The rest of your wallet.</strong> The transaction reveals only the UTXOs it spends. Your other addresses, your total holdings, your transaction history beyond those specific coins: none of it is exposed by the protocol. The executor sees the inheritance, not your wealth.</p>
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<p><strong>Your heirs' identities.</strong> Heirs appear as addresses. A name, a face, a relationship — none of that is in a Bitcoin transaction, and none of it is in what BAL sends.</p>
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<p><strong>Your activity and your lifetime.</strong> Executors cannot tell whether you're alive, active, traveling, or simply quiet. The Check Alive mechanism that postpones your delivery date works through your own wallet — the server doesn't track you, ping you, or monitor you. There is no surveillance built into the protocol, because there is no need for any.</p>
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<p><strong>Any way to profit from what it sees.</strong> This is the crucial point. Even the limited information above is useless for abuse: the transaction is already fully signed, so it cannot be altered; it is time-locked, so it cannot be broadcast early; and its outputs are fixed, so not a single satoshi can be redirected. A Will-Executor that tried to front-run, censor, or manipulate would gain nothing — and would lose its fee, which is only paid when the inheritance executes exactly as written.</p>
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<h2>Privacy by architecture, not by policy</h2>
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<p>Most services protect your data with a privacy <em>policy</em> — a legal promise that can change with an acquisition, a subpoena, or a new CEO. BAL protects it with <em>architecture</em>: the protocol was designed so that the sensitive data never exists on the server in the first place.</p>
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<div class="tablewrap">
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<table>
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<thead>
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<tr><th>What traditional inheritance exposes</th><th>What BAL exposes</th></tr>
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</thead>
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<tbody>
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<tr><td>Your legal identity</td><td>Nothing — no accounts</td></tr>
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<tr><td>Full inventory of your assets</td><td>Only the UTXOs in the transaction</td></tr>
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<tr><td>Heirs' names and relationships</td><td>Heirs' addresses only</td></tr>
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<tr><td>Family structure, stored in public records</td><td>Nothing — no records exist</td></tr>
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<tr><td>Protected by: a privacy policy</td><td>Protected by: protocol design</td></tr>
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</tbody>
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</table>
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</div>
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<p>You cannot leak what you never collected.</p>
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<h2>Optional hardening for the privacy-conscious</h2>
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<p>The protocol's defaults are already strong, but Bitcoin hygiene adds another layer:</p>
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<ul style="padding-left:22px">
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<li><strong>Use fresh addresses for your heirs.</strong> Electrum generates new addresses freely; an address that has never appeared on-chain carries no history to analyze.</li>
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<li><strong>Consider multiple executors.</strong> Splitting your will across several Will-Executors from the WeList is primarily a redundancy feature — but it also means no single server is your only counterparty.</li>
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<li><strong>Review before you send.</strong> The plugin always lets you inspect the generated transactions before anything is transmitted. Verify the outputs yourself; trust is not required.</li>
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</ul>
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<h2>The honest summary</h2>
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<p>A Will-Executor sees one signed transaction: some addresses, some amounts, a date. It does not know who you are, what else you own, or who your heirs are — and the cryptography guarantees it can do nothing harmful even with what little it sees.</p>
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<p>Compare that with the alternative: a folder in a lawyer's cabinet containing your name, your family's names, and the full list of what you own.</p>
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<p>Inheritance used to require giving up your privacy to be safe. We built BAL so you could keep both.</p>
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<p><em>Want the technical detail? The full protocol walkthrough is in the <a href="https://bitcoin-after.life/docs/protocol/how-it-works.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">manual</a>, and both the <a href="https://bitcoin-after.life/gitea/bitcoinafterlife/bal-electrum-plugin" target="_blank" rel="noopener">plugin</a> and the <a href="https://bitcoin-after.life/gitea/bitcoinafterlife/bal-server" target="_blank" rel="noopener">server</a> are open source — verify, don't trust.</em></p>
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const toggle = document.getElementById('navToggle');
|
||||
const nav = document.getElementById('mainNav');
|
||||
if (!toggle || !nav) return;
|
||||
|
||||
function setOpen(open) {
|
||||
nav.classList.toggle('open', open);
|
||||
toggle.setAttribute('aria-expanded', open ? 'true' : 'false');
|
||||
toggle.setAttribute('aria-label', open ? 'Close menu' : 'Open menu');
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
toggle.addEventListener('click', function () {
|
||||
setOpen(!nav.classList.contains('open'));
|
||||
});
|
||||
nav.addEventListener('click', function (e) {
|
||||
if (e.target.tagName === 'A') setOpen(false);
|
||||
});
|
||||
document.addEventListener('keydown', function (e) {
|
||||
if (e.key === 'Escape') setOpen(false);
|
||||
});
|
||||
})();
|
||||
</script>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
Reference in New Issue
Block a user