> Schemes like that are not easily possible with physical assets or fiat currency.

Of course they are. It's called last will and testament.

You can easily set this up, choose a lawyer to hold it and your friends don't even need to know.

If you have substantial assets it's even much safer that way, because using your method you'd actually put them in danger as criminals might pay them a visit one by one whether you're still alive or not. Not to mention the fact that your friends could also just get together and cash out early...

1. Said friends have no need to know who each other are. They only need to know their role to deliver a package to designated individuals.

2. The shards they hold can only be used by the recipient via hardware they have physical access to. They can not collude without the recipient. I also trust the, far more than any potentially malicious bank insiders.

3. Wills can take a long time to process and bank accounts can be frozen for months following the death of a spouse. I want a plan that gives those I wish access to capital as soon as they are in a safe location to receive it and get the bulk of it stored in a coercion resistant way with a new quorum.

> 1. Said friends do not know who each other are.

Security by obscurity is a poor choice.

> The shards they hold can only be used by the recipient via hardware they have physical access to.

Sounds like multiple points of failure right there. From lost/faulty hardware to friends passing away. If your scheme relies on every single one of them having access to working hardware of sorts and being alive and well, that's an elaborate way to setup for failure, but maybe I just completely misunderstood your setup there.

> 3. Wills can take a long time to process and bank accounts can be frozen for months following the death of a spouse.

I don't see how that's a problem given that your scattered group of friends needs to verify your demise and somehow get on a quest to gather the key shards without even knowing of each other's existence (again, I could totally have misinterpreted your scheme here).

This all sounds more like a D&D questline to me than a solid plan to ensure your assets get to the right people after your passing.

Why would said individuals need to know who each other are. They should all act independently of each other and simply hand off their payload to the recipient.

Assume the individuals in my scheme are all lawyers at different firms around the world that all have instructions to hand an envelope they do not know the contents of to designated individuals in the event of my death. This is a well understood scheme. I just do it with a redundant quorum so I can avoid any one lawyer being able to consume the contents of said envelope themselves and tolerate some of them failing to perform their duties.

As far as the hardware the recipient has access to, that can be duplicated to any similar off the shelf hardware via a 24 word paper backup and storing paper redundantly and durably is a solved problem.

These schemes use well understood standard cryptographic protocols as well. Shamirs secret sharing and bip39. The rest is just human logistics.

SSS is one of those things that remains highly un-ergonomic. We'll see how it works out, but I suspect that a lot of people are going to be in for interesting surprises when they chose not to use k-of-n and one of their friends lost a key part. A lot of tech people become very attracted to fun ideas (I definitely remember people falling in love with SSS decades ago). But building foolproof systems is not just about cryptography. Heck, the very first "Why Johnny Can't..." was precisely about a solid cryptographic system nonetheless leading to people fucking up all the time.

And you absolutely could publish an encrypted password and distribute key parts in precisely the same manner, enabling your quorum of friends to access your bank accounts or whatever.

What about when the banking system mandates password rotation, or randomly closes the account because of suspected fraud, or it gets wiped out due to actual fraud, or it gets frozen because of a pending investigation, or gets drained dry without warning over a forgotten debt etc. Bank accounts are brittle and I have seen every one of these situations happen to myself, family, or friends.

Also not to mention leaving USD in a bank account long term rots it to inflation.

Meanwhile in crypto-assets the funds stay exactly where they are and are impossible to move until a private key is available.

Shamirs. hardware wallets in vaults, paper wallets... the point is you have choice and control. Any process documented well enough can be followed in the future. We still cook recipes generations old after all.

Ok. Those are completely different issues to the one we are discussing. We were talking about accessing credentials and funds when somebody dies. Swapping to talking about incorrect account closures or inflation is just changing the subject.

Yes, nobody can close your wallet (well sort of, big players like Coinbase or OpenSea can absolutely treat your wallet as poisoned and refuse to transact with you).

This is a frustrating component of the discussion about crypto. “It is better for survivors” shouldn’t be defended with “inflation is bad.”