Let me clarify the point about escrow credentials. I don’t think there’s any need to change the executor function; but there probably is a need for executors to have break glass access to credentials. A quick and dirty fix that might work right now would be existing username/password pairs, but perhaps in time this could become special delegate keys (with perhaps limited actions associated with the delegated role).

Your comment also raises for me questions around how things like PoA and proof of being an executor get transferred into the digital realm. I’m guessing that you spent a lot of time on help lines and sending faxes/copies of paper documents to get through what you did. This was almost certainly frustrating and time consuming for you, but I expect it was also a costly exercise for the service providers. How things might be different if you could present digital tokens instead (within the context of a well understood legal framework like we already have for PoA and executors).

In my case, I had a full power of attorney for the decedent during his life, and also was an executor of the will. I am SO not a lawyer. Interestingly, while a PoA expires at death, I was able to do things like transfer funds, commingle assets and sell shares, justifying my actions under the same theory that allows an executor to go and lock the doors or change the locks of a decedent’s house to prevent break-in, thus maintaining the value of the assets belonging to the estate. I’d bet that several institutions should not have accepted the PoA but they did. I used it to deal with issues such as online brokerages, online banks etc that tidied up the estate before and just after the death.

I also had the challenge of dealing with some digital assets (due to the age of the decedent these were relatively meager, but digital assets they were). Here I am positive that I should not have had the PoA accepted, and I realized that in essentially social-engineering control of the digital effects (to paraphrase George Carlin, ever notice that all your shit is stuff until you die, at which point they instantly become your, ‘effects’?) I was both protecting the assets and breaking at a minimum the terms of use under which they were accepted by the online entity. After some time, I did end up showing proof that I was an executor of the estate, and that was sufficient to gain access to remaining online effects and carry out things like ‘last post’ etc.

Your calls for service registries, EULA provisions and last post provisions are spot on (for a number of reasons I can’t go into here); I wonder about the escrow credentials – I think surely this is covered by the executor function? Are you suggesting that the credentials be escrowed for someone who is not an executor but who nonetheless was declared as ‘trusted’ by the decedent during his life to handle digital assets? Isn’t this simply another function of the executor?