How to put Bitcoin in your will

The separation principle

Sound crypto estate planning separates two things that instinct wants to combine:

• The legal instrument — your will, which says the holdings exist, who inherits them, and who has authority to deal with them. This may become public.
• The access mechanism — the keys, backups and procedures that actually move the coins. This stays private, secured separately, and is released only on the triggering event.

Your will points to the mechanism. It never contains it.

What belongs in the will itself

1. Acknowledgement that digital assets exist. Without this, an executor may never think to look, and there is no paper trail leading anywhere.
2. A specific or residuary gift of those assets to named beneficiaries, drafted to cope with holdings whose value may move dramatically between drafting and death.
3. Authority to deal with digital assets, expressed to work with The Fiduciaries Access to Digital Information Act, including the power to access devices and accounts.
4. A pointer to where the access instructions are held — the custodian, the law firm, the safe deposit facility. A location, never a credential.
5. Consideration of a digital executor, if the person best suited to the technical work is not your general executor.

What must stay out

• Seed phrases and recovery phrases, in whole or in part
• Private keys in any format
• Exchange passwords, PINs or two-factor recovery codes
• Hardware wallet PINs or passphrases
• Precise physical locations of backups — "the safe in the basement" is a map for a burglar who has read the file

Where the access instructions actually live

The right answer depends on how much you hold, who you trust and how technical your beneficiaries are. Common arrangements include a sealed instruction package held by your law firm and released on proof of death; multi-signature schemes where keys are distributed so that no one person can act alone but a defined quorum can; and time-locked or dead-man arrangements that release access after a documented period of inactivity.

Each has real trade-offs between security, complexity and the risk of the arrangement itself failing. Choosing badly is worse than choosing simply — a scheme so clever that your executor cannot operate it has the same outcome as no scheme at all.

Five mistakes we see repeatedly

1. Telling nobody anything. Perfect security against theft is also perfect security against your family.
2. Relying on one hidden backup. A single sheet of paper in a single location is one house fire from total loss.
3. Naming an executor who cannot do the work. Authority without capability solves nothing.
4. Never testing recovery. An untested backup is a guess. Recovery should be verified before it is needed.
5. Letting the plan go stale. New wallet, new exchange, new hardware — and the documentation quietly stops matching reality.

Related

• What Saskatchewan law says your executor can access
• Our crypto estate planning service
• What happens to your Bitcoin when you die