Schwartz Proposes Duplicate Wallet Inheritance Plan for Bitcoin Owners
Ripple board member and XRP Ledger co-creator David Schwartz proposed an inheritance plan for Bitcoin owners on August 3. The setup involves giving two duplicate hardware wallets to separate relatives, with each device containing a single shared PIN.
According to Schwartz's idea, the same 24-word recovery phrase would be loaded onto both devices. This way, access is divided between physical and knowledge components: one relative holds the signing device without the PIN, while another trusted friend has the PIN but no device.
The setup relies on relatives and friends remaining reachable, trustworthy, and capable of coordinating to transfer the Bitcoin after the owner's death. Schwartz emphasized that his proposal is 'one way' to handle inheritance and not a finished product or guaranteed security model.
A suspected Coldcard firmware failure has led to several high-profile attacks, with four waves potentially moving around 1,815 BTC across over 5,000 addresses. The issue highlights the importance of securely generating seeds, as copying a wallet is only safe when the original seed was generated correctly.