Death is the biggest "buyer" in cryptocurrency

Author: Pix
Translation: Saoirse, Foresight News

People in the cryptocurrency space often say, “Not your keys, not your coins.” It sounds powerful, and indeed it is. But there’s an underlying mirror logic behind this — “Only your keys can give you ownership of your crypto.”

If no one else knows how to access your wallet, then the moment you cease breathing, your cryptocurrency is essentially “non-existent.” Of course, this doesn’t mean it disappears literally — it still exists on the blockchain ledger, but from an economic perspective, it’s no different from being burned.

So how large is the scale of this “death buyer”?

Today, most cryptocurrency holders are quite young, most between their late twenties or early thirties to around forty.

Few holders are beyond retirement age, which makes the issue of “cryptocurrency loss due to death” easy to overlook. But even so, the data is quite startling:

• Approximately 60 million people die each year worldwide (based on a global population of about 8 billion);
• About 500 million people globally hold cryptocurrencies (meaning roughly 1 in 16 people owns crypto);
• Since crypto holders tend to be younger than the global average population, their mortality rate is lower, with a conservative estimate of about 0.2% annually;
• Based on this, about 1 million people (500 million × 0.2%) die each year among the holders.

Currently, most cryptocurrencies are still managed privately, and holders rarely have estate plans in place. Even if only 10% of wallets belonging to the deceased become inaccessible due to unknown access methods, approximately 100,000 wallets could become invalid each year. Assuming a conservative average balance of only $20,000 per such wallet, about $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency would exit circulation annually. And this number is expected to grow over time — after all, the younger generation will gradually age.

Percentage of total cryptocurrency “destroyed” annually due to death

This leaves us with a critical question: since the advantage of personal custody of crypto is removing intermediaries, how can we pass on these assets without reintroducing intermediaries?

Passing down assets not originally designed to be “inheritance-friendly”

Most current solutions tend to swing between two extremes: simple but fragile, like storing seed phrases in a bank safe (easy to lose or steal); or secure but so complex that no one is willing to use them. Neither approach is ideal. Therefore, I’ve adopted a balanced method — a simple three-step inheritance process that is easy to remember, hard to crack, accessible anytime anywhere, and 100% non-custodial (meaning no reliance on intermediaries). The steps are as follows:

Step 1: Build a dedicated single-page website

Create a one-page website using a “rare domain name” composed of 3-4 words — such domains are not easily typed into search bars by ordinary people, but should hold special significance for you, making them easy to remember. Prepay for hosting for over 10 years and set up auto-renewal to ensure the site remains accessible long-term.

Step 2: Encrypt and convert seed phrases into a string of numbers

Pick a book you like, find its most common publisher, and buy 10 copies (ensuring each book’s pages and layout are identical). Then, convert your crypto wallet seed phrase word-by-word into a sequence of numbers: for each word in the seed phrase, find its position in the book, and record “page - line - word position in line.” For example, “112, 3, 5” would mean “page 112, line 3, the 5th word.” Convert all seed phrase words this way into number strings.

Step 3: Upload the number string to your dedicated website

Simply publish the converted number strings as a list on your created website, like this:

By the way, this is a real seed phrase’s corresponding number string, linked to $500 worth of crypto. However, the domain name is fictional; the actual seed phrase is hidden in some book. Just a tip: I love good detective novels very much, wishing everyone “happy treasure hunting”~

I know this might sound a bit “over the top,” and some may think it unnecessary, but this method truly balances security and flexibility in asset inheritance. You can further enhance security, for example, by using a rare book or printing a copy yourself to store the position information; of course, you can also skip all that — just put a hardware wallet (Ledger) and a metal plate engraved with your seed phrase in a safe. Otherwise, your crypto might ultimately just be “donated” to the blockchain (i.e., permanently inaccessible).