As part of the inheritance protocol, your beneficiary must store a decryption key to access an encrypted version of your mobile key stored by Block. They need their own Bitkey wallet (app + hardware) to securely store this information long-term and benefit from our recovery protections. Ultimately this is a safety-focused choice in our design - storing keys long-term is hard, and this protocol is based on your beneficiary having a key, not on their government ID or anything like that. And I’ll look into where we might be able to clarify this more/earlier.
Bitkey did not make clear to use the inheritance feature you need to buy two bitkeys. This makes it both double the cost and much less noob friendly imo. Still a great start but a downside that should’ve been made much clearer. https://support.bitkey.world/hc/en-us/articles/32959918821012-I-have-been-invited-to-become-a-beneficiary-what-do-I-do
Discussion
Yeah it’s an incredibly hard problem for which there are no easy answers. Just my experience was this was unexpected, and was a nonstarter for the beneficiary. They’re not into bitcoin and don’t want to have to store a physical device and are scared they’d lose it.