Inheritance on the Blockchain
Since Bitcoin became a part of our world in 2008, Blockchain technology became too. But for many years, the only use cases regarding the magic behind distributed ledgers, remained in the financial sector. The question pops up: Are there any other problems occurring in our world, that may be solved using blockchain? The answer to that question is pretty clear — they exist! Every process today, that requires a third party, which you need to put your trust in, can be in some way rethought in a decentralized manner. One of those processes is the inheritance of your own valuable assets.
Let’s first start with a short declaration of what an asset actually is. Well, in the most simple manner, you can divide the set of assets into digital assets and real world assets. Digital assets might be anything in the range from passwords to social media accounts to cryptocurrencies. And real world assets? This is just anything, that you are able to touch and that you feel a deep connection to — cars, houses, cameras, valuable books,…
When it comes to the question of your own death, all of us tend to do the same thing — we ignore it. Death is not really a part of our lives, that we want to have. But someday, everyone should start to think about his own death and what will happen to all our assets, after we no longer walk our way on this planet. As it works today, we write our last will, choose some will executer (in most cases a lawyer) and let the rest just become part of a future, we are no longer part of. But imagine for example, you have a collection of very valuable books, and you want them to be with one of your friends, who loved reading the same way you did. But just because you didn’t choose your executer right during your lifetime, those books got into the hands of a family member, who never realized the true magic of books. Just thinking about that could make you sleepless for some nights…
So, what might be a solution to that issue? Be your own will executer! You should be the one, telling who gets what, even after your death! But how is that possible? The answer is one simple word — code. Your last will and the corresponding execution, this is what shall be put into code. And this code, assuming it to be immutable, gets stored in a decentralized network, a network, in which manipulations get noticed instantly by the other participants. Such a network exists, and its the blockchain network.
Working on the future, making last wills and their executions be in your own hands, this is what Eternitas.io aims to achieve. How is it done? Well first, you start to think about your assets and who like to inherit them. You write down your last will, encode it with cryptographic methods (not you on your own, but the Eternitas software will do it for you) and store it in a blockchain network. This is the first step. Your will got transformed into code, the code got stored in the blockchain, the blockchain is decentralized, perfect!
In the next step, you need to consider the execution of your last will. And, without any surprise, there is a code based solution for that, which you might have heard of already while browsing news about cryptocurrencies. I am talking about so called smart contracts.
A smart contract actually is nothing else than a normal contract in real life, just having some slight differences. First, it is written in computer language. Second, once created, it cannot be manipulated. You create your smart contract with the help of Eternitas, in which you declare who will get what after your death. And in the (hopefully for you improbable) case of your death, this smart contract will be executed automatically.
How can this work? Let’s get a little bit more into detail. In your smart contract, you declare all of your assets plus who gets them. Your assets get tokenized. This means, that all the properties, that a certain asset in your posession has, get transformed into code — a perfect digital copy. This works either for digital assets like cryptocurrencies or real assets like valuable books. There are many startups in the blockchain scene working intensively on creating decent tokenization solutions. So your assets are tokenized and put into your smart contract. After everything is done properly, the contract gets stored in the blockchain, and decentralization is achieved. After the network registers, that you unfortunately are no longer a part of the living world, it transfers the tokenized assets to your heirs, and nobody can change it! You are the one, being in charge. Congratulations!
Currently Eternitas.io is working hard on developing the above described solutions. The goal is, to create a global will register first, going on to a template solution to simply create your digital last will and then to tokenizing the assets, so that the last will can be executed without the help of a third party, that we actually never really trusted. But we are not in a hurry, since all of us are for sure going to live forever!
Thanks for reading :)
