Bitcoin Inheritance Planner: 15 Schemes, Scored — On-Chain vs Off-Chain

Bitcoin inheritance fails in boring ways: an heir who finds the seed but not the passphrase, a multisig whose descriptor died with its owner, a company-run “inheritance plan” that assumed the company would outlive you. This planner cuts through fifteen schemes — from a metal plate and a good letter to Miniscript timelock decay and insured collaborative custody — with one question doing most of the work: is the handover enforced by Bitcoin script, or by a company’s continued existence? Answer six questions and get the two or three schemes that fit your heir, your stack and your tolerance for trusting anyone.

The refresh burden nobody advertises

The on-chain schemes (Liana, Nunchuk’s on-chain inheritance key, hand-rolled OP_CSV) use relative timelocks: the clock counts from each coin’s last movement. That is precisely what makes them a dead-man switch — stop moving coins and the recovery path eventually opens — but it cuts both ways: while you are alive, you must periodically re-spend each UTXO back to yourself before its timelock matures, or your recovery key goes live early. Liana’s interface surfaces which coins are approaching expiry, and the trade-off is yours to tune: short timelocks mean heirs wait less but you refresh more. If you know you won’t keep that calendar, say so in the planner above — it will steer you to static schemes or provider-run switches that ping you instead.

What’s coming, and what’s already here

Covenant-based vaults (OP_CTV/BIP-119, with OP_VAULT/BIP-345 behind it) would make inheritance vaults stronger still — but as of mid-2026 CTV is in a signaling window with earliest activation around 2027, so covenants remain a future capability, not a product. The deployable reality today is Miniscript plus the timelocks Bitcoin has had for years, and that’s what Liana, Nunchuk and AnchorWatch already ship. One category error to avoid: Silent Payments (BIP-352) is a receiving-privacy protocol, not an inheritance mechanism — its keys need an inheritance plan like any others. Among providers we assessed but did not score: Swan Vault (upgraded to Vault Plus in January 2026, so not discontinued — but US-centric, with 2024 corporate turbulence worth weighing and no confirmed Canadian availability).

The Canadian estate reality

Canada has no inheritance tax, but death triggers a deemed disposition: the CRA treats your bitcoin as sold at fair market value on your final return, and the estate settles the capital-gains bill before anything passes to heirs. Bitcoin then flows through provincially-governed probate like any other property — which means the executor named in your will must be able to actually find and access the coins, or the asset is stranded regardless of what the will says. Skip US-style constructs (transfer-on-death designations, US trust structures) that don’t map onto Canadian succession law, and note that foreign-property reporting (T1135) can apply above CAD 100,000. None of this is legal or tax advice: whatever scheme the planner recommends, align it with a valid will and executor instructions through a Canadian estate lawyer — the custody plan and the legal plan have to name the same people and survive the same disasters.

Build the technical half with our other references: sovereignty scores for the wallets themselves live in the wallet sovereignty matrix, air-gapped signers are compared in Bitcoin signing devices — including the fully open-source SeedSigner DIY kit we stock for multisig quorums — and the self-custody learning path starts at Sovereign Computing 101. If you’re setting up a family multisig and want hands-on help with the hardware side, talk to the bench.