Yeah. Yes. All right. Great. So yeah, we didn't really discuss topics or anything, but
the main thing for me that I've been focused on for nearly a decade now in this space is
security, specifically self-custody. And for the past six years, I've been the co-founder and
chief security officer at Casa. And what does Casa do? We're basically a security consulting and
software solution for folks who have a lot of Bitcoin or Ethereum based assets to protect. So
essentially, if you have enough assets in this space that it's meaningful and would really,
really hurt to lose, then I think it's worth talking to us and figuring out if we can help
you step up your game. Basically, we do this with bespoke level of consulting because this is
very a personal set of decisions that everybody has to make. There's various trade-offs. And we
pair that with a very user-friendly mobile app, which essentially allows you to coordinate a
multi-signature system where you have multiple geographically distributed keys that are then
used to protect and unlock your assets. So today, what I actually want to talk about
is estate planning or inheritance issues. Like this is something that not many people,
I think, think about. You don't really want to think about death and planning for that,
but it is something that is going to eventually affect all of us. So I will note that a lot
of the stuff that I say is very jurisdictional specific, at least in the first part of this
presentation. So as always, consult your local attorney because your mileage may vary based upon
the laws wherever you're living. But one thing that I think is helpful to just start off with
is to talk about the idea of probate and what happens when somebody dies, just in case you're
not familiar with that process. Basically, you can end up in a situation where if you
haven't planned out beforehand how your estate is going to be handled, then your heirs might
actually get some nasty surprises. They may be expecting a certain amount or type of inheritance
and actually end up getting something like a tax bill or a lien or some other creditor notice
that they have to deal with and settle. So one thing that I think is important
that a lot of people don't understand about the estate process is that the executor has
some sort of decision making capacity about how things get doled out and handled. But really,
the executor is only there to carry out the wishes that you have spelled out in your will or your
trust or what other legal mechanisms you have in play if you're not going to end up just using
whatever the default inheritance law in your jurisdiction is. So the executor doesn't actually
make decisions about these distributions. They're really just dealing with the minutiae and the
bureaucracy of getting from point A when you pass away and everything is in your name through all of
the issues of payments of debts and taxes to the final end point where the remainder of your assets
are actually delivered to your heirs. Now sometimes the executor is a trustee if you have a trust.
A lot of people look at the position of executor as a great honor like, you know,
should I make my executor be my best man or my maid of honor, you know, someone who is really
close to me. But I think it's important to note that being an executor, especially if it's over
a more complex estate is a huge pain. It's time consuming. And at least in America, it can come
with some pretty huge liabilities. Like the executor is personally liable for anything that they
mess up during their tenure. So in short, you want to make your executor's job as easy as possible.
So one thing, you know, with that all in mind, I just want to talk about some of the issues of
crypto inheritance and especially self-custody crypto assets. Of course, that's what I have
specialized in for a long time. If you have your assets with a third party custodian, they may or
may not have some sort of option within their own software system to allow you to designate
beneficiaries. But as I'll talk about later, designating beneficiaries can actually be problematic
in and of itself. So, you know, if we're talking about self-custody crypto inheritance,
you're probably aware that with self-custody, there is no safety net. You know, if you have
failed to set up a plan for inheritance transfer of your assets to your heirs,
then it's most likely going to be lost forever and nobody is going to be able to access it.
You know, in contrast with legacy estate plans, generally, even if your heirs lose things like
share certificates, there are ways to get them back, usually through your trusted third parties.
But with self-custody, we have our own autonomy, our own self-sovereignty,
and you have to take on the responsibility ahead of time of, you know, sinking through all of the
different situations that may arise. So, this lack of a safety net is why I think it's even more
important for people with crypto assets to think about their inheritance planning earlier rather
than later. And another common pitfall that comes up quite often in estate planning, whether it's
traditional or crypto stuff, is that your estate plans are pretty much guaranteed to never be up
to date. Did we have a question? Yeah, okay. We'll hold questions then. So,
you know, we all like to think that we're responsible and we're on the ball, but you don't
want to set up some sort of overly specific, like laser-perfect type of plan that you expect to
execute on your passing because it's pretty likely that something is going to change in
between the time in which you set up your inheritance plan and you actually pass. So,
you know, think about it, you know, whenever you go through making some sort of major change in
your assets, maybe you purchase a property or something, or you take on new equity in the
ownership in some company, how often do you have a knee-jerk reaction of, oh, I should go update my
last will and test it? You know, this is just not something that people think about. And so,
that's why it's very easy for stuff to get out of date. Along with all of this, some people think
that you may need like a crypto savvy lawyer to actually deal with helping you set up your
estate planning if you have crypto assets. And, you know, while that could be a plus,
I don't think that it's necessary by any means. So, you know, you don't even really want any of
your documents to specifically reference your crypto assets. It's actually something that
I advise against. Once again, this is going to vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. But,
if your estate ends up going through the probate process, at least in America, then
a lot of the documents related to that become public record. So, you don't necessarily want to
be talking specifics about your assets in any documents that could become public record. This
could become problematic for your heirs. Another reason why you might want to avoid having too
much specifics in your inheritance documents is that, you know, if you're talking about like
specific crypto wallets, for example, it's so easy to change assets and move them from one wallet to
another that that's just another type of thing where you might do that for any number of reasons
and then fail to think about, oh, I should I need to go update my my last well in testament now
because I specified things about these exact wallets. Related to the designated beneficiary
stuff, one of the big problems that comes up with that if you're doing that with custodial accounts
is that designated beneficiary assignments tend to override anything in your last well in testament.
And the reason why this becomes problematic is generally as a result of asset distribution.
And to give you a specific example, you know, let's say that you have like two different
traditional retirement accounts. And one of those accounts had a whole lot of Enron shares and the
other account had a whole lot of Berkshire Hathaway shares. And, you know, at the time that you set
this up, they were roughly equal. But then by the time you pass, they have become, of course,
massively different in value. And if you are you are relying upon designated beneficiaries where you
had, you know, designated one of those accounts to one of your heirs and one to another heir, then
that can very easily get out of whack. And of course, your heirs would probably not be particularly
happy about that outcome. For security and privacy reasons, another reason why you don't really want
to reference crypto in your estate plan is because of that public information issue. So for one,
like you should definitely not put seed phrases or private keys or any really highly sensitive stuff
into those documents. But even if you're just talking about crypto assets at a really high level,
even that, if it becomes public information, could paint a huge target on your heir's backs. And,
you know, that could make them ripe for social engineering, hacking, or even just solicitation.
So for those reasons, probably best not to mention crypto at all in your last will and testament.
And then not even specific to crypto, but you may not even need a will at all. Once again,
this is highly jurisdictional specific. But generally, there are default inheritance laws
in place that give your, your heirs and your next skip of 10 assets that are divided up in a
fairly fair way. And most people would generally be agreeable to just using whatever, you know,
those local defaults are. But, you know, this is something that of course is
very specific to each person. And of course, to their jurisdiction. So
we, we want to avoid a number of really common setups. And these are all based upon conversations
that we have had with many different Casa clients who set up their own plans before coming to us.
And I myself had a fairly convoluted plan many years ago that probably would not have been executed
successfully by my executors if it had actually come down to it. So the first of these really common
things is a letter of instruction. And this is something that I had done for myself. And
the sort of default way that people go about this is because usually there's only one crypto person
in the family, usually the rest are not particularly savvy or spending a lot of time thinking about
it. And so the crypto savvy person thinks, okay, I'm going to write this really detailed step by
step instructions that can't possibly fail and give those to my executor. And even though that
person knows nothing about self-custody because I've written it so well, then they'll be able to
reconstitute the keys and access the funds. And to give you a parallel to something from legacy
estate planning, let's say like you have a small business or unique assets like art or collectibles,
even in those non-technical situations, we've seen issues where errors will mess it up because
maybe they're not sufficiently motivated, maybe they're just two out of their minds from grief
and stress and all of the other issues that come up during an estate handling process.
There's just a lot of potential room for error for errors, expecting them to follow complicated
instructions, especially if you aren't rehearsing them regularly because once you're gone, they're
not going to be able to ask you any questions. I think one of the best ways to really show why
this is easy to screw up, if you go on YouTube and you search for instructions to make a peanut
butter and jelly sandwich, this is a common exercise that I've seen in various corporate
environments, but basically it is exactly what it sounds like. The task is write down step by step
instructions for someone to create a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, assuming they know nothing
about peanut butter jelly sandwiches. The person who then is given those set of instructions
approaches them adversarily and naively, what you find out is that even for something as simple
as constructing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, it's extremely difficult to actually write
perfect documentation that cannot possibly be misconstrued or followed incorrectly.
Another problematic issue that we see quite often is this concept of the treasure map,
and so we see people sharding their seed phrases, maybe they're doing more sophisticated
smear secret sharing or more naive splitting up of like a 24-word seed phrase into several
different chunks and hiding those in different places. And for the same reasons, similar reasons
to the letter of instruction and similar reasons to like why you shouldn't put specific instructions
in your last one in Testament is that people tend not to keep these things up to date. And so
things happen all the time where stuff gets moved around and the person just neglects to
update their instructions or their treasure map. So if you're not keeping your treasure map
up to date and constantly thinking about this whenever you change anything related to your
assets, there's also just a lot of potential for that treasure map to not work when your
beneficiaries really need it. And then lastly, as I touched on with the beneficiary designations
and automations, that's generally problematic more just from a balance and distribution of your assets.
So the neat thing about all of this self-custody stuff, there is a variety of do-it-yourself
solutions, both for the crypto side and for the legal side.
If you're someone who's really stuck in this analysis paralysis mode,
then I think one of the easiest low-hanging fruits, and I think this may be America specific,
but freewill.com is a completely free website. And in about 20 minutes, it makes it really easy
for you to go through and set up a pretty simple will. And what's the hit? Is this a legitimate
thing? This site was actually constructed by a number of major charities in the United States,
and so you will get a couple of mag screens that are like, hey, do you want to donate some of your
assets to our charities as a part of your estate? But other than that, it's completely legit and
free software. And you should, however, if you go this path, still hire an attorney just to
oversee the signing of the will that gets generated, because even though the will itself is valid,
if you screw up even a minor technical detail on the signing, like say a witness accidentally
leaves the room or they're not a strong witness upon your passing, then it can easily invalidate
everything. So it's good just to pay a couple hundred bucks to go to a local attorney to do
that signing and be a credible witness. So let's see if we can get a bit more technical now.
And you may have heard of some of the terrible calamities that have happened in this space.
I think learning from other people's mistakes is really one of the primary ways of how we make
progress in the world of security. So every tragedy, every catastrophe that happens, that's a
learning opportunity. And I think one of the most extreme examples of inheritance failure occurred
with Matthew Mellon a few years ago. He died unexpectedly, suddenly at a somewhat early age,
and he had hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto assets, and nobody knew how to access them.
So those are gone forever. That's unfortunate for the Mellon family. I think they'll be fine
regardless because of their own situation. But once again, we can learn from that and not repeat
those footsteps. And that was very simple. He just didn't have any crypto asset inheritance
planning at all. So you're getting off of zero. That's the first step. Just do something. And then
you can think about having how to make it more and more robust. So the biggest problem that we
find in this space, whether it's security issues or inheritance issues, is this lingering
issue of single points of failure. And if you're going to do it yourself route, another good option
that I would recommend if you want to explore architecting your own self-custody inheritance
solution is to read a book that Pamela Morgan published, I think around six years ago. It's
called Crypto Asset Inheritance Planning. You can get it on Amazon for like 30 bucks. And I learned
a lot from that book because I hadn't thought through all of the adversarial situations that
can happen amongst heirs and executors. And when you have multiple beneficiaries, things can get
really contentious. So it's the type of stuff you need to think about ahead of time in order to save
your heirs, a lot of potential issues and conflicts. Basically, the clearer your inheritance plan is
usually the less opportunity there is for people to fight over it.
Now, overly complex systems are a big problem from a technical perspective. And that's basically
because the more moving parts you have in a system, the more things that have to go right in order
for it to work, usually the more things that can go wrong and cause it to not work. So
the interesting thing about doing self-custody crypto inheritance is that it's kind of a tightrope
problem. So on one hand, you want to set up your self-custody architecture so that while you're
alive, you're the only one who can spend those funds. But if you pass away, you want this magical
switch to flip. And you want some new designated person or set of persons to be able to access
the keys and be able to spend those funds that they were not previously able to do. So it's a
pretty delicate balancing act. It's easy to overcomplicate what you're doing when architecting
these systems, especially once you get multiple people involved. So it's easy to miss single
points of failure. To architect these systems as well, you have to think pretty adversarially,
pretty pessimistically, look at every part of the system and figure out how it might fail and what
would be the result of that part failing. And so Casa's whole shtick is to architect robust systems
where pieces of it can fail. We expect people to be human, make mistakes, hardware and software
to fail for whatever reason. But the whole idea is that we build in enough redundancy and
flexibility so that a failure does not result in a catastrophic loss.
So I spoke a little bit about how I had my own inheritance solution a long time ago and I basically
created this treasure map. And I was doing really nerdy stuff. I was putting seed phrases on an
air-adapt computer and putting that into a text file, which then I was putting into a
basically virtual disc, a virtual encrypted disc piece of software that I had this really,
really long, randomly generated passphrase that would decrypt it. I gave multiple copies of that
encrypted disc to my heirs and executors. And then I did a Shemir secret sharing of the passphrase
itself so that no single person could decrypt the files. And while this is a highly secure setup,
I can almost guarantee you that something would have gone wrong if my beneficiaries had been in
the position where they had to follow those instructions. And it was using half a dozen
different tools that basically nobody other than extreme security and privacy people
use in the first place. If any of those tools had failed, then they would not have been able to
decrypt that file. It would have been game over. And I never actually did the full gameplay of
making sure that my executors were actually capable of following those instructions and
decrypting those files. I just kind of hoped that they were sufficiently technical to follow the
instructions. And another thing that not many people even really think about unless maybe you're
a software developer is that if any of your inheritance instructions or process is relying
upon your specific software and operating systems and stuff, the entire software ecosystem
is incredibly complex, especially when you're talking about software dependencies. And over
long periods of time, like 10 years, it's actually quite common for software to stop working,
especially if it's no longer being maintained because the underlying software libraries and
operating systems and other dependencies will often change in non-backwards compatible ways
that end up breaking the applications themselves. So there's a number of things that you can do
or not do that result in your inheritance being fully recoverable. If you've got a very important
substantial part of your net worth where you're doing this delicate balancing act with, then
it's not just about having a high level of security because if you have too much security,
it's actually just as bad as having not enough security. The highest level of security is essentially
putting funds into a wallet and throwing the keys away. That's 100% secure. Nobody can access it.
But while it might be slightly better feeling if your money gets lost forever rather than
ending up in the hands of a thief, your heirs are probably going to be upset either way.
So there's plenty of examples of over securing coins. For example, Stefan Thomas, one of the
earliest Bitcoin contributors, earned I think 5,000 Bitcoin for creating one of the first-ever
marketing videos. He put all of that into a set of keys that were on a hardware device called a
Titan key, which is a fairly widely used enterprise security hardware device. However, you didn't
write down the pin that decrypts the Titan key. And so after I think 10 tries, the Titan key
will wipe itself if you put in the wrong pin. I think he has two or three attempts left at this
point. And so right now he has 5,000 Bitcoin that's sitting in some highly secure vault somewhere,
and it's kind of in a quantum state where it may be lost forever or it may somehow become accessible
in the future if the technology to break into that device gets developed. So of course, if you
don't have enough security, then you might potentially lose those keys and those funds
to an adversary. I think this is one of the big aspects and value of what we provide at Casa
is that although we're putting people into slightly more complicated setup architecture
with multiple keys, we're doing that and leveraging this idea of strength through diversity. And
basically, we help people put their keys on geographically diverse locations, on diversity
of different hardware manufacturer devices, and as a result, diversity of different firmware and
software on those devices. So that, once again, eliminating single points of failure from a variety
of different perspectives. But one of the trade-offs of having more complexity is that you need to be
checking in on your keys every once in a while. And so that's why we've built in ideas of health
checks where if you haven't touched one of your keys in six months, the app will just remind you
like, hey, you should go sign a message with this key. Just prove that it hasn't been lost to something
like BitRod or hardware device failure or even physically lost or destroyed. This is how you
ensure that your security level remains exactly where you expect. And once again, you don't run
into that issue kind of like with having stale inheritance instructions. If you don't touch
stuff for years at a time, you might come back to it and find that something has become invalid or
broken. So I think this all leads to the question of how do you create a self-custody setup that
magically changes ownership upon your passing? And there's nearly an infinite number of ways
to architect these systems. And that's one of the reasons why doing yourself can be pretty dangerous.
You may be familiar with the mantra of virus enumerous. It's used a lot in the crypto space,
generally referencing cryptography and the math behind it. It basically translates to strength
and numbers. And I think that strength and numbers applies from a variety of different
perspectives, not only to the keys and the cryptography behind them, but also to any given
software project or any given system that has been architected. Basically, the more eyes that
you have on a system, the more likely due to the diversity of different perspectives of people
looking at it, that the flaws in the system will be exposed and fixed. And so you end up
with a stronger system overall. So my point being that if you have architected your inheritance plan
all by yourself and no one else has evaluated it, it's highly likely that it has flaws.
And this was true for even me. Just because I'm an expert in security in the space
doesn't mean that I'm omniscience that I can think from more than my own perspective.
And I can miss stuff. And like I said, I certainly had flaws in the system that I had set up for
myself 10 years ago. So you kind of have to think of this. It's like a governance or a game theory
problem. Let's say you have a single signature wallet, which is, I would say, the most common
form of self-custody. In that case, the simplest solution that I can think of would be to generate
that wallet so that it requires an additional bit 39 passphrase in order to access it. So then
you could give the wallet seed phrase to each of your heirs. And then you could give the passphrase
to say your executors. So with that type of system, you effectively have a two of two system
to access the funds. And you can have multiple redundant backups. The only thing that you're
really counting on in that situation is that your heirs won't collude with your executors
while you're alive. Now, personally, I'm not a fan of passphrase-based wallets because
they're pretty brittle. I've seen a lot of folks lose access to their funds because they forgot
the passphrase and didn't have it redundantly backed up. But hopefully in an inherent situation,
you would make sure you had multiple redundant backups. And a few months ago,
Casa rolled out our latest iteration of inheritance. And this was a result after
several years of offering a fairly bespoke inheritance setup that was highly reliant upon
working with attorneys and working within the legal system. And this was bespoke because
everyone has their own particular needs and setups and threat models. And one of the biggest
issues that we feel like we've been fighting against at Casa is just people feeling overwhelmed
and not confident that they can put themselves into a self-custody setup that they can sleep
well at night with. So we're constantly pushing things on the usability side. And we feel like
we understand security very well. But what's the point of having an incredibly secure system
if it's so difficult to use that almost nobody bothers to do so? So one of the things that we
focused on with our new inheritance solution was making it really easy to set up. It only takes
about 10 minutes. And it doesn't require any convoluted setup of proprietary hardware devices.
It's really as simple as scanning some QR codes back and forth on the phones between you
and your beneficiaries. And we feel like pretty much everybody is going to be comfortable doing
that at this point. And we actually decided to completely avoid the legal aspects of this.
We found that we were incredibly constrained when we were trying to do inheritance from a
legal perspective. And we ended up only being able to serve U.S. and Mexican clients with that
bespoke inheritance setup because of just how many different jurisdictions there would be in us
ending up having to work with potentially lawyers in every jurisdiction where we have clients.
So obviously you still want to have a legal Last Well Intestament, which is why I spoke
at length about it in the first part of this presentation. But because Casa is a global company,
we want to be able to provide inheritance solutions for everyone. And what Casa cares about
is what these crypto networks care about, which is access to the appropriate key material.
Bitcoin couldn't care less what your Last Well Intestament states. It doesn't care about the probate
and inheritance laws in your jurisdiction. If you're not able to convince the Bitcoin network
and the nodes with the right cryptographic signatures, then any legal preparation and
paperwork you have is not going to help you. So we wanted to have a software solution that would
approach this from a technical perspective, the key management side of things.
And this really is made for non-technical people. So if you can use Facebook or X
or Telegram or whatever, then you can definitely get through our system. To give you a concrete
example of how it works, because we do have a variety of plans and key architectures.
With our basic plan, this is a two of three multi-sig, and you have one key on your phone,
one key on a hardware device, and one key is held by Casa. And during your normal activities,
you would be signing with the key on the phone and with your hardware key to spend those funds.
Casa's key is offline. It's only meant to be used in emergency recovery purposes if
something goes wrong with the other keys. So what happens when you want to onboard
an inheritance beneficiary? Well, it's basically a matter of just inviting their email address
to join into your account. It only takes a few minutes. And then you do a secure encrypted key
transmission of that mobile key between your devices just by scanning a QR code.
So basically, you're giving them a copy of one of your three keys, but it's encrypted and they
don't actually have access to that seed phrase. And then we built in some time locks and games
theory around the system so that if the time comes and you pass away, then the recipient
can initiate the inheritance process within the app. Basically, it's as simple as them going
into the app, clicking a button that says, hey, I want to claim that this person has passed away
and kick off the inheritance process. And this basically starts a six month window. And during
that six month window, Casa reaches out to you to the account owner and says, hey, you're designated,
beneficiary has told us that you passed. If you're still alive, let us know, click this button,
give us a call, go into your account if they're trying to screw you over and kick them out of
the account because they shouldn't be doing this. And if that six month period passes without you
contesting it, then the recipient is able to decrypt and sign a transaction with the mobile key
and then request that Casa sign, co-sign and complete the transaction with our key.
So this is some pretty simple game theory.
We're not even getting into more complicated aspects of cryptographic protocols that could
be used for this. Once again, we don't want to introduce too much complexity or introduce
complexity just for the sake of doing cool stuff at the protocol level. But it's something that's
so simple where, like I said, we foresee this having a much higher level of adoption simply
because the bar is so low. And this is something that we've worked on for over a year with a lot
of our clients. And of course, we've tested it out ourselves. Thankfully, we have not had any
clients die yet on this plan. But I can tell you that we've had some clients pass away before we
had this available where they were not a part of our earlier bespoke inheritance. And it was a
really weird situation to be in because it would basically be like, we receive an email to our
support system and it says, hey, I'm the spouse of so-and-so and they pass. Can you help me out?
And first of all, we'd be like, hey, we don't know who you are. You're not on our list of clients.
And we have to send them off and basically go get a court order to sign an attestation saying,
yes, this person did pass. Yes, this is their spouse. Yes, they are a part of the estate process.
And so then we could actually work with them. But it didn't always work out well even after
that point because one of the primary things about Casa is that we don't actually know nor do we
want to know what you're doing with your keys. We don't want to know where they are and how
they're secured. We don't want to have the quote unquote treasure map that could potentially be
leaked and used against you. So there have been times when we've had to say, we're sorry, but
there's nothing else we can do because we don't know where the rest of the key material is and we
only have one of the keys, which is not enough to spend funds. Let's see. I already talked about that.
So I've talked about several different options for inheritance planning. Like I said, there's
basically an infinite number of permutations. One of the great things about this space is that we
have the freedom to construct our own security models. Of course, the flip side to that is the
pitfalls and the potential that you may introduce room for failure if you're doing something all
on your own without getting consultation from others. So you don't have to use Casa by any means
for your inheritance. It just really comes down to how much time and effort you want to put into
it. So I think that is pretty much all the high level stuff and I bet we've got a number of questions
and I'll be happy to answer them.