I want to talk about death. I'm going to die one day, probably*. More than likely*, so will you (sorry).

* remember, I'm a sci fi writer. And I'm in total denial. You know how that goes

I have a teeny portfolio of crypto (not to humblebrag or anything, but almost enough in it to buy a one way plane ticket fron Seattle to LA, or a really kicking pizza party, lol). If I got abducted by aliens tomorrow, my family wouldn't be out a fortune or anything.

But maybe one day I will. And maybe you already have a juicy wallet that would be an actual loss if you found yourself tossed into a time vortex, unable to return to the present.

We already know this is a big ass issue** with cryptocurrency. Seed phrases and hardware wallets, just like a drawer of sex toys, are what you don't want anyone else to play around with (except in...circumstances, which you...control, yea) when you're alive -- but HFS, you hope your partner is the one to deal with all that, should you spontaneously combust or rapture or wind up in the land of fae.

** not even going to mention the whole Gerald Cotten debaucle, complete with shareholder demands to exhume his body

It's estimated that 15 to 20% of Bitcoin has "rotted" (what a euphemism) because account owners went to heaven or Narnia or another dimension. And there's no way for anyone to recoup these either.

@noncielodicono did a nice summary on some of the options available for ensuring your crypto and digital assets get passed on when you do. I only had one additional possibility to toss out -- to me is most obvs: write down all your private keys and seed phrases, on paper, with instructions your least tech savvy pal could grok, and put it in a safety deposit box. Make sure that safety deposit box is listed among your assets in your will.

Related and interesting sidebar: Pascal (PASC) has built into its infastructure a deletable blockchain*** that circumvents the idea of coin rot by allowing dormant accounts to be re-released into the environment.

Pascal solves this issue by allowing an inactive account to be repossessed by a miner after a
4-year period. An account is considered inactive if no state change has occurred within 4 years.

*** oy. Pascal is having a writing contest, and I tried, ever so hard, to find something I could write about. I couldn't. Blegh. Until I got to this, which is HELLA INTERESTING, and has only one mention in the whitepaper, and no other detailed info. So, no entry. Blog post instead

This is a quietly revolutionary idea, imho. I mean, hopefully, you're going to do something to make your assets inheritable.

But, if you don't or can't, at least any PASC isn't gone forever.

If we die, that is. Maybe.