What is the difference between inheritance and digital inheritance?

Have you ever thought about what happens to your crypto when you die? What’s the difference between traditional inheritance and “digital” inheritance?

Can you make your crypto and other digital assets inheritable just as you do with traditional legacies?

What is inheritance?

Inheritance is receiving money, property, debts, entitlements, obligations, etc. after someone passed away.

Property and debts can be officially inherited via a will. That will can be attested by a notary, lawyer or any other lawful means.

What is the difference between inheritance and digital inheritance?

What exactly do we mean by digital inheritance? How does it differ from traditional inheritance?

When a person dies, he or she has more to his/her name than physical assets or property.

In cyberspace, you most likely also have possessions and an identity. Think about social media accounts, email addresses, investments, bank accounts, crypto wallets, NFTs, …

After a death, family members are often left with piles of accounts on social media without access to them.

Or what happens if family members do get hold of the required passwords, but there’s no trustworthy supervisor? Or no clear authority to access the deceased accounts and funds? One family member can steal or hide everything without the rest even noticing.

This is a difficult and often emotional dilemma which you can avoid by creating a secure decentralized digital estate plan.

The difference between inheritance and digital inheritance is the person who is in control.

To properly transfer digital assets, it is advised to operate in a decentralized way. This means without central executor or centralized storage.

Can your heirs just access your Bitcoin after you died?

You have made a great investment in Bitcoin. Worst case scenario: tomorrow you die unexpectedly.

Apart from all the human suffering for your friends and family, the question then arises what happens to your digital assets.

Looking ahead is the message when creating an estate plan. Whether digital or physical.

In that regard, there are few differences between inheritance and digital inheritance. Some issues for example are more specific to digital inheritance.

Digital inheritance: beyond crypto

Your digital estate plan can also include online accounts and password. If you don’t plan, your descendants may no longer have access to photos, videos, or certain investments.

Besides Bitcoin, your digital inheritance can also include your online accounts, such as your bank account information or password for social media.

The rise of computers and the internet has changed a lot in the world of estate planning. It is now possible to digitally encrypt assets. You can basically merge all the accounts in your vault into one file and encrypt it.

The next step is to make sure your heirs have access to your digital estate. Planning and organising, as well as forward thinking, are crucial at this point.

Distributing shares of an encrypted file to those designated in the legal deed or administrator is the central step.

How do you decentralize your digital inheritance for optimal security?

Specialized software such as Inheriti® will help you with this. Inheriti® allows you to create a decentralized inheritance plan. In doing so, you distribute the keys or “shares” of the encrypted data to those you have included in the digital estate plan.

The principle here is as follows:

1. Inheriti® encrypts data
2. Inheriti® splits data into encrypted shares
3. You distribute the encrypted shares to your beneficiaries of choice
4. Beneficiaries put shares together to decrypt original data when the moment is there

It is the digital equivalent of the unwritten law that the most important people in a company never take a business trip together on a plane. Or that different people only know a small part of a password, so they have to come together to execute stuff.

By “decentralizing” them in this way, you are protecting your legacy while keeping full control.

It’s important to know that beneficiaries are unable to decrypt the original data without the owner’s approval or the Dead Man Switch being triggered. This is a protection so the shares can not be used without the owner being notified first (or without the Dead Man Switch being triggered).

Setup a decentralized Inheritance Plan

The user-friendly user interface and the transparency of your inheritance plan make it that Inheriti® offers you a great and reliable standard to manage the inheritance of your legacy yourself.

It’s the only safe and 100% decentralized solution to digital inheritance. And we have multiple patents in different jurisdictions around the world.

Click here to learn more about our patented solution: Inheriti® »