If you’ve researched Bitcoin inheritance, you’ve found roughly the same five options I did. Each has real users. Each has real failure modes. Here’s an honest tour.
Disclosure: I’m building one of these (pre-signed timelocked transactions, last in the list). I tried to write the others fairly anyway. Use whichever actually fits your situation — for some people the answer here isn’t going to be Bitheritance.
1. Hand over the seed phrase
Write down your seed. Give it to your heir. Hope.
Pros: free, zero technical complexity, works.
Cons: your heir loses it. Or spends it before you die because they got curious. Or has it stolen because they keep it in a Google Doc. Or you have a falling out and can’t get it back. Or they lose interest in Bitcoin entirely and the paper goes in a drawer that gets sold at an estate sale.
Who it suits: one technically-literate heir you trust completely. Probably not romantic partners — divorce statistics are real and the seed is irrevocable.
What breaks: time. Five years is a long time to keep a piece of paper safe and not look at it.
2. Multisig with family
A 2-of-3 multisig wallet where you hold one key, your heir holds another, and a neutral party (lawyer, sibling) holds the third. While you’re alive, you and the neutral party can sign. After you die, your heir and the neutral party can sign.
Pros: no single point of failure. Heir doesn’t have unilateral access while you’re alive. Industry-standard pattern; well-documented coordination tools.
Cons: three keys to secure, back up, and remember. Your heir loses theirs. The neutral party moves overseas. Your hardware wallet bricks. Coordinating signing at the moment you need it (after a death) is exactly when coordination is hardest. Two of three signers need to be alive, available, and able to use a coordinator app five or ten years from now.
Who it suits: technically-literate families with existing trust relationships. Especially if the “neutral party” is a lawyer with a key in their office and a written instruction.
What breaks: time plus coordination. You’ve moved “one person remembers things” to “three people remember things and find each other when it matters.”
3. Custodial inheritance service
Casa Covenant, Unchained’s IRA, Nunchuk Inheritance, some exchange-based beneficiary programs. A company holds at least one key in a multisig. When you die, your heir contacts them, proves identity, and the company co-signs the transfer.
Pros: good UX. Professional support exactly when the heir needs it. Companies have institutional incentives to outlive any individual user. Some of these are quite polished.
Cons: you’re trusting a company. Companies fail, get hacked, get acquired, change terms, get regulated out of existence, decide they want different customers. Self-custody — the reason you’re not just leaving your Bitcoin on Coinbase — exists because trusting companies with Bitcoin is exactly the failure mode crypto was meant to fix. Also: real money. Casa Covenant is several thousand dollars per year.
Who it suits: holders with significant wealth, completely non-technical heirs, high tolerance for ongoing trust in a service provider. People who’d hire a lawyer to handle their estate anyway.
What breaks: the company. The base rate for “crypto companies failing within a decade” is depressingly high — Mt. Gox, FTX, Celsius, BlockFi, Voyager, Genesis, and that’s just the headline list.
4. Shamir’s Secret Sharing (SLIP-39)
Split your seed into N shares, requiring K of them to reconstruct. Distribute shares to different people / locations. When you die, K of them gather their shares and reconstruct the seed. Trezor supports this natively.
Pros: mathematically elegant. No single point of failure. Doesn’t require any third-party services. Multiple geographies / institutions can each hold a share.
Cons: same coordination problem as multisig, plus a more serious one — anyone who reconstructs the seed has full access to the wallet, immediately, with no time limit. There’s no “and only after I die” property. The first K share-holders to collude win. Recovery shares are also weird artifacts non-technical heirs will have no idea what to do with.
Who it suits: sophisticated holders who want geographic / institutional distribution and have multiple genuinely-trustable parties to give shares to.
What breaks: collusion before death. The K shareholders never have to wait for you to die — they just have to find each other.
5. Pre-signed timelocked transactions
This is what Bitheritance does, so calibrate accordingly. Sign a real Bitcoin transaction today with nLockTime set to a future block. The network refuses to accept it until that block is mined. Give the signed bytes to your heir. They sit on them. When the block fires, they broadcast.
Pros: no third party at any step. The Bitcoin network itself enforces the unlock. The signed transaction works in any Bitcoin wallet — Bitheritance is the wizard that helps you build it, but the artifact survives independent of any company. Heir doesn’t need to be technical (handoff PDF is built for them). You can cancel at any time by spending a committed UTXO.
Cons: fee is baked in at sign time — mainnet fees might be 10× in 4 years and your tx sits unbroadcastable. Recipient address can’t change after signing. Post-quantum is a real concern past 2030. Spending any committed UTXO accidentally cancels the plan, which is both the cancel mechanism and a footgun.
Who it suits: self-custodial holders who specifically value not adding a company to the trust loop. People setting up “if I lose my own keys” backups. Anyone whose heir already has a Bitcoin wallet (or will).
What breaks: fees / quantum / the heir losing the package. Each is real but addressable. None of them require trusting another party.
How I’d actually pick
If your heir has zero Bitcoin literacy and probably never will: a custodial service is the honest answer. Pay the company; they’re paid to do the support work and you’re not equipped to bridge the gap.
If you have one technically-comfortable heir you fully trust and you’re OK with “they have my seed forever, including before I die”: just give them the seed. Stop overthinking it.
If you want neither a company in the trust loop nor a custodian of your live keys: pre-signed timelocked transactions. The trust model is “Bitcoin works.” If you self-custody, that’s the bet you’ve already made.
For large holdings or institutional contexts where redundancy across people matters more than minimizing trust: multisig, professionally configured. Pay someone to set it up properly.
Most serious holders end up running two or three of these in parallel — splitting a stack across different inheritance models, hedging against the failure mode of each.