Bitcoin Inheritance Delay 6 Months

Six-Month Probate Delay and Custody Degradation

This memo is published by CustodyStress, an independent Bitcoin custody stress test that produces reference documents for individuals, families, and professionals.

Why Six Months Is Common

Someone dies owning bitcoin. Probate begins. Six months pass before heirs can meaningfully act on the inheritance. This timeline is not unusual—many estates take six months or longer to reach the point where assets can be accessed and distributed. A bitcoin inheritance delay of 6 months represents a common scenario rather than an extreme one, yet within this window, multiple factors can shift from favorable to unfavorable. What seemed like a straightforward inheritance at the moment of death may become complicated by the time anyone is positioned to act on it.

This document addresses what can change during a six-month inheritance delay and why that timeframe creates meaningful exposure to degradation. Six months is long enough for memories to fade, for physical circumstances to shift, for relationships to strain, and for technical environments to evolve. It is short enough that people assume nothing significant has changed. This combination of actual change and assumed stability creates conditions where problems emerge unexpectedly when recovery is finally attempted.

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Why Six Months Is Common

Estate administration follows legal processes that have their own internal timelines regardless of what assets are involved. Courts require notifications to creditors, waiting periods for claims, inventories of assets, and various filings before distribution can occur. Even an uncontested estate with cooperative heirs and straightforward assets typically takes four to six months to reach the distribution phase. Contested estates, estates with tax complications, or estates in jurisdictions with slower courts routinely take longer. Six months represents a realistic baseline rather than an outlier scenario.

During this period, executors and heirs often cannot act freely on specific assets even if they know about them and have located the necessary materials. Legal restrictions may prevent distribution until certain steps are completed. Fiduciary duties may require caution about moving assets before proper accounting. Uncertainty about claims against the estate may counsel waiting. The delay is not caused by indecision or negligence but by the structure of the legal process itself, which developed long before bitcoin existed and does not account for the specific vulnerabilities of cryptographic assets.

Families experiencing grief and administrative burden during this period often defer bitcoin-specific tasks. More immediate concerns demand attention: funeral arrangements, immediate financial needs, coordinating with attorneys and accountants, managing the deceased's household and obligations. Bitcoin recovery feels technical and deferrable compared to these pressing human needs. The delay happens naturally, without anyone deciding to wait, simply because other priorities fill the available attention and energy.

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Memory Degradation in Six Months

Human memory is unreliable even under favorable conditions, and six months provides substantial opportunity for recall to degrade. Family members who heard the deceased mention something about their bitcoin—where materials were stored, what the passphrase might be, who helped them set things up—may find those memories becoming vague. The specific details blur while the general impression remains, creating confidence without accuracy. Someone who felt certain in the first weeks about what they heard may feel much less certain by month six, or may feel equally certain about a memory that has subtly shifted.

Conversations during the immediate aftermath of death often contain relevant information that no one thinks to record. A family member mentions that the deceased kept important papers in a particular drawer. Another recalls hearing about a safety deposit box. These details seem obvious and unforgettable in the moment, when grief and shock are fresh. Six months later, when someone finally turns attention to bitcoin recovery, those conversational details may have evaporated. The information existed in the family's collective memory for a brief window, then dissipated as other concerns took over.

Passphrase recall presents particular challenges. If any family member was told the passphrase or given hints about it, their memory of that information degrades with each passing month. Passphrases are often designed to be memorable to the person who created them, using personal references and patterns that make sense internally. Those same passphrases may be difficult for others to remember precisely because the mnemonic logic belongs to someone else. A family member who could have reproduced the passphrase in month one may struggle with it by month six, unsure whether a word was capitalized, whether a number was included, whether a space appeared between elements.

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Physical Circumstances That Shift

Six months is long enough for the deceased's living situation to change substantially. Houses get cleaned out, sold, or transferred. Personal belongings get sorted, distributed, donated, or discarded. A desk drawer that contained important papers in month one may be empty by month four, its contents moved to boxes in storage or thrown away by well-meaning helpers who did not recognize what they were handling. The physical environment where custody materials existed does not remain frozen while legal processes unfold.

Safe deposit boxes present their own timeline concerns. Banks have procedures for handling boxes belonging to deceased customers, and these procedures may result in inventory and closure within the six-month window. If no one has accessed the box to identify and secure bitcoin-related materials, those materials may be inventoried by bank employees who do not understand their significance, stored in ways that make later retrieval complicated, or even disposed of according to standard protocols for unclaimed contents.

Property that passes to new owners creates access problems. If the deceased's home is sold to satisfy estate obligations or distributed to an heir who lives elsewhere, materials stored in that home may become difficult to retrieve. The new owner may not allow access for searches. Items may be discarded during move-out cleaning. Even if materials technically remain in the property, the practical ability to find and retrieve them diminishes as ownership and control transfer to people who have no knowledge of what they might contain or where they might be.

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Technical Environment Evolution

Software continues evolving whether or not anyone is ready to use it. Wallet applications release updates that change interfaces, modify procedures, or deprecate features. Six months of updates can accumulate to the point where instructions written at the time of death no longer match the current software behavior. A document explaining how to restore a wallet using a particular application may reference buttons, menus, or steps that no longer exist in the version available six months later.

Hardware wallet firmware updates present particular complications. Manufacturers regularly release updates that must be applied before devices will function with current companion software. A hardware wallet that was current at the time of death may require firmware updates before it will connect to the applications needed for recovery. These updates may require entering PINs or confirming on the device itself—actions that presume knowledge the heirs may not possess. The device that would have worked immediately becomes a device that requires navigation through update processes that add complexity to an already unfamiliar task.

Online services that touched the deceased's bitcoin holdings may change their terms, procedures, or existence entirely within six months. Exchanges merge, rebrand, or shut down. Custody services modify their inheritance procedures. Support channels change their contact methods. The landscape of available help shifts, potentially eliminating resources that would have been available had recovery been attempted sooner. A service that offered account recovery assistance in month one may have discontinued that service by month six.

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Relationship Strain Over Time

Families under the stress of estate administration often experience relationship deterioration as months pass. Initial cooperation gives way to frustration as processes drag on. Disagreements about other estate matters spill over into interactions about bitcoin. People who would have helped each other in the immediate aftermath may be barely speaking by month six, making coordinated recovery efforts difficult. The social infrastructure that would support recovery erodes in parallel with other forms of degradation.

Information hoarding can emerge as tensions rise. A family member who knows something relevant to bitcoin recovery may become reluctant to share that information if they feel mistreated in other aspects of estate administration. Knowledge becomes leverage in disputes. Cooperation becomes conditional. The simple act of pooling information—which would have happened naturally in the first weeks—becomes fraught by month six, requiring negotiation and trust-building that may not succeed.

Professional relationships also shift over the estate administration period. The attorney handling the estate may become less responsive as other matters compete for attention. Accountants may complete their work and disengage. Technical advisors who offered help initially may have moved on to other clients. The network of professionals who could assist with bitcoin recovery has its own decay curve, separate from family dynamics but equally capable of reducing available support over a six-month period.

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Compounding Effects

These degradation factors do not operate in isolation—they compound each other in ways that make recovery progressively more difficult. A family member whose memory of the passphrase has faded cannot compensate by checking written instructions if those instructions were discarded during a property cleanout. Software that has changed cannot be navigated using guidance from a technical advisor who is no longer available. Relationship strain prevents the coordination that might overcome any single obstacle. Each problem makes the others harder to solve.

The person attempting recovery at month six faces a substantially different situation than they would have faced at month one, but they may not realize how much has changed. They approach the task assuming conditions similar to what existed immediately after death, only to discover that multiple legs of their recovery plan have weakened or collapsed. The backup location they were told about has been emptied. The helper they expected to call has become unreachable. The process they planned to follow no longer matches the software. Each discovery adds friction and uncertainty to an already stressful process.

Partial information creates particularly frustrating scenarios. Enough is known to suggest recovery should be possible, but not enough to actually achieve it. The family knows bitcoin exists. They have some materials but not all. They remember some information but not completely. They are close to success but cannot close the remaining gaps because the resources that might have helped—fresh memories, intact materials, cooperative relationships, unchanged software—have degraded during the six months of waiting.

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What Six Months Does Not Affect

The bitcoin itself remains unchanged on the blockchain regardless of how much time passes. No degradation touches the asset itself. The addresses still hold the same balances. The cryptographic requirements for moving the bitcoin remain exactly what they were at the moment of death. This permanence creates a misleading sense that time does not matter—the bitcoin is still there, so recovery should still be possible. The fallacy lies in confusing the asset's stability with the stability of everything required to access it.

Seed phrases stored on durable materials may survive six months without degradation. Metal backups, properly stored paper, and other resilient media can remain fully readable. If the deceased prepared materials well and those materials remain in their storage locations, the physical components of recovery may be intact. The problem is locating those materials, understanding how to use them, and possessing any additional information (like passphrases) that the materials alone do not contain.

Clear written instructions also retain their value if they remain with the materials they describe. A letter explaining exactly what to do, stored with the seed phrase and any necessary passwords, continues to provide guidance regardless of elapsed time. Such instructions compensate for memory loss and help navigate software changes. Their presence transforms the recovery situation—but their presence requires the deceased to have created them and the heirs to have found them, neither of which six months of delay makes more likely.

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Assessment

A bitcoin inheritance delay of 6 months represents a common rather than unusual timeline for estate administration. Within this window, multiple degradation factors operate: memories fade, physical circumstances shift, technical environments evolve, and relationships strain. Each factor alone creates obstacles; combined, they can transform a manageable recovery into a challenging or impossible one.

The bitcoin itself does not change—it waits on the blockchain indefinitely. But everything surrounding the bitcoin degrades during delay: the human knowledge of how to access it, the physical materials needed to recover it, the software tools required to use it, and the relationships that would facilitate coordinated effort. Six months is long enough for significant degradation in all these areas while being short enough that people often assume nothing important has changed.

This combination of actual change and assumed stability characterizes the six-month risk window. Heirs who defer bitcoin recovery during estate administration may find, when they finally turn attention to it, that conditions have shifted against them. What would have been straightforward in month one has become complicated by month six, not through any dramatic failure but through the quiet accumulation of small degradations that the delay allowed to proceed unchecked.

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System Context

Examining Bitcoin Custody Under Stress

Bitcoin Custody Behavior by Net Worth Concentration

Bitcoin Estate Deadline Timeline Misalignment

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