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What would a Deadmanswitch service need to do for you to trust it?

2 points by disruptthelaw ↗ HN
Imagine a service designed to help manage your death. You upload your will, a list of your assets, passwords, death instructions etc, and when you die access gets granted to your loved ones.

For the time being assume this service exactly matches your needs in terms of functionality, price, user experience etc.

What would need to be in place for you to actually trust the service with your data and to give you confidence that the service will outlive you?

What protocols could the service put in place to ensure that its fail proof? These could be tech protocols or in-person protocols.

I'm not a programmer so I'm thinking more in terms of non tech solutions like giving users voting rights and promising that users will maintain 51% control, or something to that effect. But I feel that there must be more developed and robust solutions to this question?

4 comments

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tlb
Local law firms do this for most people. The state courts will resolve any disagreements, and reassign administration of the will if, say, a giant meteor wipes out the entire law firm. There are also rules for if I'm incapacitated but not dead.

Estate law is a well-worked out system that has dealt with all the issues that have come up for millions of people over hundreds of years. It'd be hard to have similar confidence in a system that hadn't been around for a long time.

disruptthelaw
Great feedback thank you.

Personally, purely from a user experience point of view, I’d rather have an online portal where I can manage my info than have to go through a law firm each time I want to update anything. As such I feel there is a business case here IF the trust issue could be resolved.

tlb
The system should have separate mechanisms for the 2 things: letting you update, and executing after you're dead.

Executing after you're dead only happens once, so it can be heavyweight.

Updating should be as lightweight as possible. One reason it's heavyweight in the current system is that, after you're dead, people who didn't get what they think they deserve can sue your estate. Often the argument is that you were under someone's influence when you updated your will. Having your estate lawyer say, "Mr. Disruptthelaw came into my office on ___ date and we discussed this amendment. He appeared to be of sound mind" is fairly persuasive to a judge. But a late-night edit to some database, even if it's on the blockchain signed with your private key, might be less convincing.

The usual way to work around the difficulty of amending a will is for the will to say "Everything in the Disruptthelaw Recovable Living Trust is goes to ___". You can move assets into and out of the trust easily.

disruptthelaw
I think you’re mostly addressing issues of user experience. Let me put it this way, just for sake of simplicity, assume all the system did was keep a set of instructions to be read by your loved ones upon your death. The instructions could be to contact your lawyer for a copy of your will, or to delete your porn hard drive, or to deliver a letter to your child etc. Forgot about estate law and those complications. Forgot whether you think there is a need for this service. Assume that you do. What matters for my purpose is that you need to trust this service to keep your info for longer than you will live, and to make that info available to the people you specified when you die. What would make you trust this system with these all important instructions? How could this company set itself up that will make it certain to deliver its promise?