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k_sze

1. Write your will;

2. Split it into N + 1 horcruxes and distribute them to your N children; and a remaining piece to a lawyer;

3. Force them to all come together to decrypt the will for fairness.

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Then what happens if one child who knows they won’t get anything, refuses to provide their piece?

BTW K of N cryptography is well known as Shamir’s Secret Sharing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing

This is what is used in hashicorp vault

And in TFA

Even worse, what if one or more children lose their bits and can’t provide their piece?

Have each child make horcuxes of their horcrux :)

Then what happens if one child who knows they won’t get anything, refuses to provide their piece?

Don’t give that child a piece in the first place!

Not all K of N schemes are "secret sharing" (the most well known ones aren't), though I agree that for this will case you probably want a secret sharing algorithm and not say, an erasure code (as you want the property of zero information transfer); however, certainly not all secret sharing algorithms are Shamir's specific secret sharing algorithm.

If you can trust the lawyers with a single piece, can't you trust them with the whole thing?

But that's not an overly complicated process with no benefit... In before block chain folks talk about wills

> 1. Write you will;

I thought this was a command!

> 3. Force them to all come together to decrypt the will for fairness.

This seems like a good recipe for ensuring integrity of the will, but it's hard (for me) to see how it ensures, or even promotes, fairness.

(Also, compelling presence seems like a strange side effect: the sort of person who would skip the reading of a will might not be motivated to ensure the fairness or integrity of the will anyway, so requiring their presence to verify it seems counterproductive.)

"fairness" as in nobody can claim somebody else has tempered with the will.

Note: thanks for spotting the typo. I corrected it.

You could just write your will and sign it with a known public key. I don't see any reason why you'd want to keep the will hidden, or require participation to read it

Getting the will is the easy part, no? Wills are public record in the UK at least.

A cautionary tale: Someone in my family died before getting his will sorted out, leaving a tangled mess of accounts and businesses. My mother was one of his executors, and they had to in effect remove themselves from the will because it was written before his children were born and they weren't mentioned (the lesson being if you have children or any one else you care about, get your will sorted out sooner rather than later - in this particularly case he was found dead in the morning without warning)

IANAL and this is anecdotal, but:

I heard of an individual who very specifically left one dollar to one of their children. The logic being, if said child hadn't been mentioned in the will at all, there could be a claim that they'd been inadvertently left out...

I'm super curious how that works in practice.

This is a truth, but usually you leave a large enough amount that people can't argue you were swayed. I've heard of $2000 to $4000 being an amount for a larger estate.

This was used as a plot line in Better Call Saul. I wasn't sure it was something real but my understanding is that most of the cases used in the show are either real cases or composites.

To be honest, that TV show is heralded as being very accurate about lawyers

In France you have a fixed part of your estate you have to share between children.

For instance if you have two of them you can freely dispose of 1/3 of your estate, the rest is shared equally between your children and spouse.

Relevant law (in French) : https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F606

To people in the US reading this, I used RocketLawyer to make a will valid in New York that specified that I currently had no children, but directed how my assets would be distributed among my future children.

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