I have been thinking about this. I started putting together a Google doc that I am sharing with some family members with details of various financial stuff such as pensions, bank accounts and insurance that will have value should I die. Of course there is also crypto. My Steem was worth serious money at one point and I still have a few grand in Hive. The two issues are communicating what it is and how to give access.
I have used the Lastpass password manager for years. They have a paid family plan that allows you to give access to others under controlled conditions. I am in the process of checking this out. It looks like you can designate people who can request access and if you do not respod within a set time they get it. So there are risks of it being abused, but then I would be very careful who I gave this too.
Of course I need to give them instructions on how they could access my crypto accounts and extract the funds. That can be in the shared document.
I have thought about ways to split the keys between several people, but that adds extra complications. There might be ways to automate a process that sends details to given people if I do not stop it happening, but that's also complex. People don't even use encrypted email, so sending anything that way is risky.
I'm interested to hear about how others are handling this.
I've seen a few of those tools that send passwords periodically (unless you stop it) to designated people. Like you said, that's subject to abuse.
I feel like there needs to be a crypto solution, like a smart contract of some kind that is trustless. The good thing about Hive is the wallet is public anyway, so what is contained there is clear. The information is also out there for would be claimants to educate themselves on the value of the token and how to cash it out, or continue staking, or whatever. The issue is how to grant access.
If only Skype worked in heaven (or hell) sigh.
There are cryptographic protocols for key splitting, but we have to make it easy for the right people to get access when needed. Maybe one of our smart developers can come up with something. Of course you can go old-school with a flash drive or printout in a safe. I'll give it some more thought.
There's a potential millionaire making tool there somewhere for a clever developer :)