How to use Dead Man's Switch to pass on your Bitcoin and crypto
If you hold your own keys, nobody can get your coins without them. That is the point of self-custody, and it is also the problem: if something happens to you, your family may know that the coins exist but have no way to reach them. Every year, a lot of Bitcoin is lost this way.
The usual fixes all have a cost. Giving someone your seed phrase today means trusting them with everything, today. Leaving it with a lawyer or in a will means it gets read by people who should not have it, sometimes years before it is needed. A dead man's switch avoids both: nobody learns anything until you stop checking in.
Do not put your seed phrase in the message
Your messages are held in a private database and our backups are encrypted, but we can technically read them, and email is not a safe place for a seed phrase. Treat the message as a set of instructions, not as a key. Here are a few ways to do that, from simplest to strongest:
- Instructions only. Keep your seed backup where it is now, for example on paper or steel in a safe. Your message says where it is, which wallet software to use, roughly what is there, and who to ask for help with the restore. Someone who reads the message gets nothing without the physical backup.
- Seed at home, passphrase in the message. If your wallet uses a passphrase (sometimes called the "25th word"), the seed on its own opens a different, empty wallet. Keep the seed at home and put only the passphrase in the message. Neither half is useful without the other.
- Encrypt it. You can encrypt the message with PGP or GPG, so that only your recipient's key can read it and we never see the contents. Your recipient has to be able to decrypt it, so set this up together and test it.
If you use multisig, the same idea applies: the message tells your heirs which keys they hold, where the others are, and how to put them together.
What to write
The person reading this may be grieving and may not know much about Bitcoin. Write for them:
- What you own and roughly how much, so they know what they are looking for.
- Where the backup is, and which wallet software or hardware wallet to use with it.
- Someone technical they can trust to help, by name.
- A warning that nobody legitimate will ever ask them for the seed phrase, and that "recovery services" who contact them are almost always scams.
Setting it up
Write the message, add the people who should receive it, and choose how long the switch should wait. Long intervals are fine for this: a few months of silence costs nothing, and a false alarm is the one thing you do not want here. Turn on push notifications from your account page, or connect Telegram or the Android app, so you have more than one way to be reminded to check in.
Free accounts can only send messages to their own address, which is a good way to see exactly what your heirs will receive. To send it to them, you need to upgrade. You can pay in Bitcoin.
As always, if you need any help, please email us.