Inheritance without custodians

Bitcoin solved self-custody for the living. It has not solved it for the dead.

If you hold your own keys and you die, your coins go with you unless you have done something deliberate in advance. Most of the deliberate options today reintroduce exactly the thing you were avoiding. You hand a copy of the seed to a lawyer, or to a company that promises to hand it on, or to a family member who now holds a single point of failure in a drawer. Each of these is a custodian wearing a different hat.

The honest version of the problem is a set of constraints that pull against each other. Nobody but you should be able to spend while you are alive. Someone you chose should be able to spend after you are gone. No third party should be able to stop, censor or front-run either of those. And the whole arrangement should survive you forgetting about it for a decade.

Bitcoin already has the primitives to satisfy all four at once: timelocks, multisig, and scripts that change who can spend as time passes. What it lacks is a protocol that assembles them into something a normal person can set up in an afternoon and trust for the rest of their life.

That is what Deathlock is. A sovereignty-first inheritance protocol: no custodians, no KYC, no company that has to still exist in thirty years for your heirs to get paid. The rest of this series will go through the design one constraint at a time.