My grandfather had bitcoin and ethereum in a digital wallet, but nobody knows the password. I've already checked with the bank but they say they can't help. Is there any legal way to inherit these assets or is it all lost?
Don't fall for the trap of hiring "wallet recovery" services that promise to access the password - 99% of them are scams. What nobody usually mentions is trying password recovery via email: if your grandfather created the exchange account with an email, you can try doing a password reset there (this works with Coinbase, Kraken and other major exchanges). If the coins were in a cold wallet like Ledger or one of those printed paper wallets, then yeah, it gets trickier, but it's worth digging through physical documents, old emails and even talking to people your grandfather knew - sometimes they leave backup clues.
Unfortunately, if the password is lost and your grandfather didn't leave any documentation or backup of the private key, those assets are basically inaccessible - no inheritance or anything will recover them. What you can try is finding a lawyer who specializes in digital law or crypto assets to check if there's any legal loophole in your state/country, but the reality is that crypto is decentralized precisely because of that, with no intermediaries to "unlock" accounts. If there's any document, note, file on an old computer, or even an email with hints about the password, it's worth investigating every possible lead, but without access to the private key itself, that money's frozen there forever.
I've seen people try to recover stuff like this, and what nobody talks about is that some exchanges (like Coinbase, Kraken) have inheritance processes where you need to prove you're a legitimate heir with documents from the deceased - it's worth checking if your grandfather had an account on any of them, because there you can actually get access without the password. now, if it was just an offline wallet or on some smaller/defunct exchange, then yeah, it really does get tough.
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