Looking for pros and cons. I want to establish crypto funds for my 5 children - ages 10 through 23. I have a Trezor - don’t recall the model but it is the older one, in the 70 dollar range.
Do you think it is better to buy a device for each child, and leave a bunch of how-to info in the event I get hit by a bus? Or put it all on mine, each in a different account. I have not created a new account just yet… I don’t know if there is separation by a new pin for each, etc.
How are others doing these “leave behinds” for family members?
As you say, there are different ways to prepare inheritance for your children with a Trezor device. In your case, since they won’t be using the accounts yet, I think the best and cheapest way is to use your own Trezor and add more accounts to it, instead of buying more devices. But if you decide to buy more Trezor devices, you should buy the same type as you use now, due to differences in functions and coin support.
Trezor can only have one Standard account, so when you add more accounts in your Trezor they have to be Hidden accounts with a Passphrase. It’s critically important that the account owner - yourself and potential future owner - knows this Passphrase, or else the assets can’t be accessed. So you should write down the Passphrases for these Hidden accounts, so they’re not lost.
Remember that Passphrases are case sensitive and space is also a valid character.
It’s also important that the future owners educate themselves in how a Trezor works, especially when it comes to Hidden accounts and Passphrases. It’s easy to do wrong and maybe lose the assets in an account if you don’t know what you’re doing. A hardware wallet like Trezor is not something you want to try and fail with. I suggest you make sure your children knows how to use your Trezor device in the future.
Except the possibility of using different devices (or different recovery seeds) or just different hidden wallets (by using different passphrases) as Petosiris has already explained above, another option (or layer of security which will also be subject to the agreement of all heirs) could be using Shamir backup.
Simply put, it is a method of splitting the seed into multiple unique shares. To recover the wallet, a specified number of shares has to be collected and used.
So in your case, you could give a share to each of your children and then not only that each heir will be left with unique passphrase but in order to get into both, Standard and Hidden (passphrase protected) wallets your children will have to put those shares together in order to recover desired wallet(s).
Note: you can set how many shares will be needed in order to recover the wallet. This feature is for now only available on Trezor model T.