Time as a Custody Dependency
How Time Degrades Coordination and Access Paths
This memo is published by CustodyStress, an independent Bitcoin custody stress test that produces reference documents for individuals, families, and professionals.
How Custody Systems Appear Stable Until They Are Tested
Time acts as an active dependency in custody systems. Custody outcomes can change through ordinary passage of time, even when no explicit failure, breach, or adversarial event occurs.
How Custody Systems Appear Stable Until They Are Tested
Custody systems frequently appear stable during their initial period of use. Keys function, devices operate as expected, and access paths are understood by the person who designed them. During this phase, time is treated as incidental. The system works, and nothing appears to be changing.
Over longer horizons, custody outcomes often diverge not because of theft, compromise, or attack, but because required components cannot be assembled simultaneously when recovery is attempted. The system does not fail catastrophically. It becomes incomplete.
Hardware devices age or become unavailable. Records are misplaced or lose clarity. People who were assumed to be reachable are not. Institutions alter policies, merge, restrict access, or cease operating. None of these changes are adversarial. They occur through ordinary passage of time.
The result is frequently surprising to those encountering custody systems after long dormancy. Nothing "went wrong" in a technical sense. Cryptographic material remains valid. No breach occurred. Yet recovery stalls because the system no longer exists in the form originally assumed.
How Time Degrades Coordination, Not Cryptography
Time acts on custody systems by degrading coordination rather than cryptography.
Cryptographic protocols are designed to be invariant. A valid signature remains valid regardless of when it is produced. A correctly derived key does not weaken with age. The technical layer of custody is largely time-independent.
Access paths, however, are not. They depend on human availability, institutional continuity, documentation quality, and the ability to interpret intent. These elements change continuously, even when unused.
Custody systems typically rely on multiple dependencies that must resolve together. Devices must be located. Credentials must be remembered or discovered. Signers must be available. Authority must be recognized. Each dependency may be individually reliable in isolation. Over time, the probability that all dependencies resolve simultaneously declines.
This degradation is cumulative. Each year introduces additional opportunities for loss of context, erosion of memory, or alteration of circumstances. Dependencies that are never exercised are not validated. When recovery is eventually required, the system is encountered in an untested state.
Human reliability is particularly sensitive to time. People forget details that were once obvious. Relationships change. Individuals relocate, disengage, or become incapacitated. Informal knowledge that was never written down disappears. Documentation that once made sense to its author may be ambiguous to a later reader encountering it under pressure.
Institutions also introduce temporal fragility. Services change terms. Access procedures evolve. Jurisdictional rules shift. What was once straightforward becomes encumbered by new requirements or delays. These changes are external to the custody system, but they act directly upon its access paths.
Custody failure therefore often emerges through entropy rather than error. The system does not degrade gradually in a visible way. It functions until the moment it is needed, at which point missing or unavailable elements become apparent. Failure appears sudden, but it is the product of long, silent decay.
Assessment
Time is an active dependency that shapes custody outcomes even in the absence of adversarial events.
Outcomes that reflect delay, blockage, or loss do not imply technical failure or poor intent. They describe how custody systems behave when access paths must be reconstructed after long periods of inactivity. Understanding custody therefore requires considering not only cryptographic correctness, but how coordination, memory, authority, and availability evolve as time passes.
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