10 Bitcoin Questions Every Advisor Should Be Ready to Answer
For wealth advisors, RIAs, CPAs, estate attorneys, trustees, and family-office staff whose clients already own Bitcoin, are asking about it, or may pass it to heirs. You don't need to become a Bitcoin specialist — you need to know where the danger zones are.
01Does the client own Bitcoin directly, or only an ETF?
These are different planning problems. An ETF position lives inside the brokerage system you already know — it transfers like any security. Directly held Bitcoin moves only with cryptographic keys, and no court order or beneficiary form replaces them. Everything else on this list depends on this answer.
02Where is the Bitcoin held?
An exchange account, a hardware wallet at home, a multisig arrangement, and a collaborative-security setup each fail differently — and each needs different paperwork, different records, and a different recovery story. "On Coinbase" and "in a safe" are both answers an advisor should be able to place on that map.
03Who can access it if the client dies or becomes incapacitated?
Legal ownership and the practical ability to move funds are separate questions. A will can name an heir without giving anyone the ability to act. If nobody but the client can sign, there may be no recovery — and discovering that after death is the most expensive way to learn it.
04Has anyone besides the client seen or stored the seed phrase?
Every additional person who has seen a seed phrase is a standing risk — including well-meaning family, staff, and yes, advisors. A professional should never ask for, photograph, or store a client's seed phrase or private keys. Knowing how to handle this moment is one of the clearest markers of advisor readiness.
05Are tax records complete?
Acquisition dates, cost basis, transfers between the client's own wallets versus actual sales, exchange statements from platforms that may no longer exist — gaps here compound quietly for years. You don't need to give tax conclusions; you need to know which questions to put on the table before tax season does.
06Is the Bitcoin owned personally, jointly, in a trust, or by a business?
Title shapes everything downstream: estate treatment, signing authority, what happens in divorce or dissolution, and who is even allowed to authorize a move. Clients frequently don't know the answer themselves — which is exactly why the question belongs in your intake.
07Is there a written recovery process?
Not the keys themselves — a process: what exists, where instructions live, who does what first, and who to call. A recovery plan that lives only in the client's head fails at the precise moment it's needed. The plan should never expose key material, and it should never be pasted into a public legal document.
08Are heirs prepared without being given dangerous access too early?
There is a balance between an heir who knows nothing and an heir who holds everything prematurely. Family readiness means the right people understand their roles and the recovery sequence — without anyone accumulating unilateral access the client didn't intend.
09Has the advisor documented what they did and did not advise?
Bitcoin conversations drift — a custody question becomes an allocation question becomes "so should I buy more?" Documenting the boundary of your engagement protects you, and it's far easier to do at intake than to reconstruct later.
10When should the advisor bring in a specialist?
The strongest answer an advisor can give is often a referral: a qualified Bitcoin custody adviser for real custody, inheritance, or recovery work; a CPA for tax conclusions; counsel for documents. Readiness isn't knowing everything — it's recognizing, early, which of these conversations has started.