The boilerplate covered "all property, real and personal." The Bitcoin, being neither in the document's eyes, left the heirs "at the gate without standing."
The M. family trust — forty-one pages of careful legal language drafted to protect everything David owns — was found this week to protect everything David owns except the Bitcoin, which is the only reason the trust exists.
The document authorizes the trustees to manage "all property, real and personal," a phrase lawyers have used for centuries and that covers houses, cars, boats, and, it turns out, not a single satoshi.
The problem, per family attorney Marcus, is a law with the unlovely name RUFADAA, which governs whether a trustee may legally touch a "digital asset." Without specific language naming "cryptographic keys, wallets, and seed phrases," the trustee arrives with full authority over the boat and none over the fortune.
"It's the most expensive omission I've ever seen rendered in beautiful typography," Marcus said. "Forty-one pages. The one sentence that mattered wasn't one of them."
Sarah, named successor trustee, noted that she now held ironclad legal authority to sell a canoe.
The canoe, sources confirm, was not the point.
Everything above is satire. Here is how it actually goes when you fix it.
Why "all property" wasn't enough
RUFADAA — the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act — is on the books in almost every US state. It governs whether a trustee has legal standing to access a digital asset. The trust has to explicitly authorize access to "digital assets, cryptographic keys, wallets, and seed phrases." Boilerplate that only says "all property" often doesn't — and without it, the trustee has no standing, no matter how much Bitcoin is sitting there.
How bitcoin-assistance helps
The assistant doesn't draft your trust — that's your attorney, and the exact language has to be theirs. What it does is make sure you know the question exists before it's too late: bitcoin-assistance surfaces that the trust must name digital-asset access, keeps a record of who the trustees and cosigners are so the vault and the paperwork describe the same people, and points you to The Paper Side and a real attorney to get the clause right.
A trust that protects everything but the Bitcoin is forty-one pages of protecting the canoe. The one sentence that matters has to name the keys.
Background, not legal advice. RUFADAA adoption and language vary by state — the clause must be drafted by a licensed attorney. See The Paper Side.