When people think about custody threats, they think about attackers. When custody actually fails, it's often because life changed and the architecture didn't.
Your custody setup was designed for a specific set of conditions: your geography, your capital level, your family structure, your health, your co-signers' availability. Change any of those and the assumptions behind your design may no longer hold. Life changes are an attack vector—not in the sense of malice, but in the sense that they can break your system as effectively as a key compromise.
Consider relocation. You distributed keys across multiple locations to avoid geographic single points of failure. Then you moved. Did your key distribution move with you? Or do you now have keys in places that no longer make sense, or with people you see less often, or in jurisdictions that complicate recovery? The architecture was sound for your previous location. It may be fragile for your new one.
Consider scaling. The custody design that was adequate at $500K may be inadequate at $5M. The threat surface expands with capital. More at stake means more incentive for social engineering, more need for legal clarity, more reason for operational redundancy. If you haven't re-validated your architecture after a significant increase in position size, you're operating on outdated assumptions.
Consider family change. Divorce, estrangement, death, or the simple drift of relationships can turn a co-signer into an ex-co-signer—someone who still holds a key but is no longer willing or legally able to participate. Your multisig may still be mathematically correct while being operationally broken. Life changes don't always update the key list.
Consider health. Your custody may depend on you being able to coordinate recovery, explain procedures, or access certain materials. Incapacity—temporary or permanent—changes the game. If your architecture assumes you're always available to guide the process, a health event becomes a threat vector.
The point is not to fear change. It's to treat life changes as part of your threat model. When you relocate, scale, or experience a major family or health shift, that's when your custody architecture needs re-validation. Not because something broke, but because the conditions it was built for have changed. Updating your design to match new conditions is maintenance. Ignoring the change is accumulating risk. Life changes are not bad luck—they're the rule. Your custody should be built to survive them.