A co-founder of a hardware wallet company and his wife were kidnapped in France in January 2025. The attackers severed one of his fingers and demanded a ransom in crypto. A 48 hour police operation ended in arrests.
Verified physical coercion incidents reached 72 worldwide in 2025, up from 41 the year before. Kidnapping was the most common tactic. Reported losses passed $40M.
There was no technical failure here at all. The exposure was that a named person was publicly associated with significant holdings.
Every disclosure decision in this lesson is also a physical safety decision. That is why this autopsy opens it.
If you live with someone you love and you hold meaningful crypto, the most consequential decision you have not yet made is how to talk to them about it.
For most readers this is a harder lesson than the arithmetic in F110-03.
The conversation has two failure modes. It never happens, and the funds vanish when you do. Or it happens badly: too much shared too soon, with the wrong framing, creating anxiety, friction, or genuine risk. Both are common. Neither is necessary.
What the conversation is for
The goal is not to make your family co-custodians of your security. It is not to teach them cryptography. It is not to reproduce, in their heads, every decision you have made about wallets.
The goal is one specific thing. If you die or become unable to act, the people you leave behind should be able to find the right help, follow the right steps, and recover what you built, without panic and without depending on remembering details they had no reason to retain.
That is a much smaller goal than "they know what I know". It is the right goal, and it is achievable in one calm conversation plus a small number of documents.
The seven parts, in this order
The words are yours. This structure lands best.
- The existence of holdings, plainly. Not a lecture on blockchains. "I hold a meaningful amount of digital assets, separate from our other accounts. I want to be sure you do not lose access if something happens to me."
- Magnitude, not a number. "A meaningful part of our savings." "More than the house." They need the category of importance, not the balance. More on why below.
- That it is not held at a normal institution. No bank, no brokerage, no customer service line. This one is essential because it removes the instinct to call a number that does not exist.
- Where the documents live. Not the seed. The safe, the deposit box, the attorney's office, the sealed envelope. Confirm they can physically reach those places.
- Who can help. A named attorney, a specific family member, an identified service. This turns "I am alone with a problem I do not understand" into "there is a phone number and I should call it."
- The rough sequence, once. "Open this envelope first, call this person second, look here third." Written down alongside the estate documents.
- Any automated system you have running. If a switch from F110-04 exists, they need to know it exists and what messages it might send. Otherwise an automated email arriving after your death will look exactly like a scam, and they will correctly ignore it.
Fifteen minutes. No crypto literacy required on their side, only willingness to follow a procedure on the day.
What you never say out loud
The information you withhold matters as much as the information you give.
Not the seed phrase. Twenty-four words in order is not realistically memorable, and a seed sitting in someone else's head is an exposure lasting decades. The seed lives in the physical plan. Your family points at the plan.
Not the passphrase, for the same reason.
Not every chain, address and transaction. That lives in the recovery documents, available when needed. Loading it into working memory makes the conversation feel overwhelming and achieves nothing.
Not during a tense moment. Not mid-argument, not in a bad month. The topic is heavy enough without competing with something else.
The urge to overshare comes from anxiety about forgetting something. The cure is that the documents are exhaustive, so the conversation does not have to be. It only has to be clear about how to reach them.
Magnitude is a safety question
This is the part the older version of this lesson underweighted, and the autopsy is why.
Physical coercion attacks target people known to hold. Not people suspected of holding: people known. The knowledge travels through social circles, public association, casual conversation, and occasionally through a family member who mentioned it to someone who mentioned it to someone.
So step 2 above is deliberately vague, and that vagueness is doing real work. Your spouse or executor needs to know the category of importance so they take the recovery seriously. They do not need a figure, and a figure in circulation is a figure that can reach the wrong person.
Every additional person who knows both that you hold and roughly how much is an additional path to a physical attack on you or on them. This is not a reason to tell nobody, which is how the funds get lost. It is a reason to make each disclosure a decision rather than a side effect of a conversation at a dinner table.
Tone
The most useful thing you can convey is that you have thought about this and there is a plan. Not a perfect plan. A plan.
People are rarely upset that their partner holds crypto. They are sometimes upset that their partner was silent about something that affects them.
Calm, prepared, with a written plan to walk through together: this version is easy. Vague and defensive, "we will figure it out someday": this version is hard and creates more anxiety than the subject deserves.
A very common pattern: the holder postpones the conversation because the plan is not finished. Years pass. The plan never reaches the standard the holder set. The conversation never happens. A seventy percent plan that someone knows about is enormously better than a perfect plan nobody knows about. Have the conversation when it is good enough.
Once a year, and on these events
One conversation is not enough. Plans change, holdings grow, tools evolve, people age.
A brief annual check-in is the baseline. Not a re-explanation. A confirmation that the documents are still where they should be, that the attorney is still practising, that the switch settings still match reality.
Update off-schedule on any of: marriage, divorce, a birth, a death in the circle, moving countries, a significant change in holdings, a new wallet or chain, or a beneficiary reaching an age you had written into the plan.
Tell them crypto exists, roughly how much it matters, that it is not held at an institution, where the documents are, who to call, the first three steps, and that an automated system may contact them. Never the seed, never the passphrase, never the full operational detail. Keep magnitude vague on purpose, because who knows what you hold is a physical safety question and not only a family one. Then review it once a year.