Topic: What would be the best way to get through customs at an airport with your Btc? (Read 2105 times)

Do not scramble the seed words. Do not write the words on random pages in a book, Do not change the order of the words. Do not omit one or more words.  Do not encrypt the words in a MS-Word file or Veracrypt or anything. Do not write only the first four characters. Do not write the index numbers of the words

All those things corrupt the fundamental purpose of the BIP39 recovery design - recovery

The chances of losing your coins because your obfuscation method was too confusing (later, when you need to do a recovery) are about 1000 times higher than the chance of being questioned at an international border

Do not store the seed words in the cloud, or anywhere electronically. This has two risks. The cloud is not a reliable storage method. The cloud is accessible to the entire Internet

The BIP39 specification has a passphrase option

Write the seed words on paper. Carry the paper. Keep other copies in safe places

Make two wallets (or 2 accounts in a Trezor or other cold wallet). One account is the seed words and no passphrase, with a few thousand Satoshis. The other account is the same seed words and a strong pass phrase, for your Bitcoin

Make a 6-word diceware passphrase. Add one random alphabetical character. This is easy to remember, and 81-bits secure
https://theworld.com/~reinhold/diceware.html

Memorize the passphrase

At the border: if you're questioned about your cold wallet (if you're carrying it), tell them what it is. If you're questioned about your seed phrase, tell them what it is. If they want to see the Bitcoin wallet, use the seed phrase to recover the no-passphrase wallet. Show them your few thousand Satoshis. That should be further than any border guard could possibly understand, today. In the future they may be better trained. Or you could be a special person (read about the constant border harassment of Glenn Greenwald and his partner for years after Greenwald reported on Snowden). If they ask whether there's a second account, you don't understand how that's possible. Your device has only one wallet

Different countries have different rules with customs and airports, but encrypted Satochip card in for of regular payment card won't bring much attention.
I am not recommending anything but nobody is going to check and confiscate your good old (and now discontinued) G-shock G-2900 watch that has data memory and password protection.
Just saying.

That's what the 5 years in prison is for.

You should probably not bring a copy of the blockchain holding 19,774,912 BTC if you use this argument
Seriously though, it's like bringing a key to a safe deposit box. You don't have to declare that key.

I really wonder, what do they do if you pretend that you forgot keys? I think that they might give up on a very average person but if there is a guy with 10k and higher number of bitcoins in front of them, what do they do? Do they use so called Truth Serums? I really wonder about that because if person hesitates to reveal the password, they can't publicly torture him but there are medicines that pushes us to reveal some of our secrets, like alcohol, right? There should be some drugs in governments that will force the person to be very open and speak truth.

If you are not a public figure and don't publicly claim that you have bitcoins, then customs will not mess with you. I have crossed borders with Electrum installed on my smartphone and PC but no one has ever asked me anything.
If no one knows, that means that it didn't happen, which means no need to declare anything.

In the US at least, anonymity has nothing to do with it. For physical currencies CBP (Customs & Border Patrol) only cares about value. btw: the $10k threshold does also apply to preloaded credit cards and gift cards though I'm unaware of CBP actually asking about them. Probably because no folks/smugglers would directly pay >10k in cash to load the cards - though they could of course pay a 3rd party in cash to have them load the cards... Oh, and in the US the $10k threshold for currencies (and gold, gems, etc.) is set by the IRS, CBP is only enforcing the IRS rule.

Duh.
Same applies to any goods, food, other items of value though they of course may be subject to other specific restrictions or import duties based on value.

They're only going to inspect your devices and USB drives if you act suspicious towards them or your travel plans and bookings are quite unusual. Customs have to process normal travelers very quickly to avoid long queues.

Personally, I like satscraper's option the best. Get an encrypted USB key, but only put a file that has the seed phrase on it. Remember the password - don't write it down - and make sure you have paper backups in another location, not with you, if you ever forget the password. For added security, encrypt the file again with GPG using an ECDSA public key and the same password, guarding against disk cloning or dd attacks. Only use the resulting USB on an OS such as Linux or Tails where you can be sure there are no keyloggers.

Customs would argue you can't use a credit card anonymously.

It's not only cash, if the value is for instance in gold you'll still need to declare it.

What freakin' country even cares about you crossing their borders and having access to BTC? Just how would it be different than you having credit cards? Either way gives you the ability to access or use currency without carrying physical currency.

Most if not all countries only care about how much fiat you are carrying, not how much money you have access to. eg, in the US you are only required to declare it if you are carrying over $10k in cash. If you are stopped by CBP and are asked about how much money you are carrying, yes you should give them an accurate number and if it is a substantial amount they may ask to verify it but if under $10k you are NOT required to declare it before entry.

If they have the device and you, you may be forced to share it depending on the law of the country. Some countries have gone mad already:
Good luck proving you forgot the key.

I have already shared the way I use more than often at my flying . Alternative to this may be  Ironkey vault privacy dongle ^{(FIPS 197,  XTS-AES 256-bit encrypted)}which encrypts your secret. Last time I used mine and may say that customs pay no attention to this stuff ^{(should they focus on it  they would not get access to its internals)}.  

I'd put on a rubbish USB with a "vault" program & password. Load documents of random stuff maybe resume & whatever else you've got maybe some photos. Straight in a laptop bag in the side pocket with chargers, another small hardive & pen. Could possibly hide the vault on the drive if you wanted to. Put it through as carry on. No one is going to blink an eye. Could also put USB inside a deodorant stick then in your toiletries bag but that's getting extreme.

Haha.

What if it did actually work?

What if the guy also had a laptop with bitcoin and they did the whole drug stuff to mislead the authorities from the real satan (aka bitcoin) ?

I was wrong. It turns out this doesn't work:

I'd say you need to have an encrypted backup at a safe (and trusted) location anyway. If your house burns down followed by a flood, you don't want to lose your Bitcoin. So when traveling to another country, you shouldn't carry your only copy.

I am having trouble seeing what advantage you have in regards to sending your seed to someone else, including your seeming presumption that there would be any secure way to send such message to someone else, just like phillipma's encoded message that he was describing from earlier?  There could be complicated ways to send seedphrases or passwords, and perhaps you are able to get access to funds, but then if anyone ever figures out or sees such system in the future (maybe past messages that you sent that are figured out in the future), then if you had already moved your coins to new addresses, then that might not be a problem to have some temporary vulnerabilities that are not very likely to get exploited, as long as you don't overly complicated your system too much that you cannot recall how to put all the pieces back together. 

I do like the idea of keeping some form of back up recovery at country A while traveling to country B in the event that somehow your system fails in regards to getting to country B, and even I am not assuming traveling just on a trip but wanting to take your whole life savings with you, yet if you have your back up recovery in Country A, and once you make it to your country B destination, you might have to figure out how to destroy your back up recovery in country A so that no one comes in contact with it.. unless again you are transferring to a new wallet.. .which sometimes may be prudent to create new wallets and transfer, even though frequently I have considered both vulnerabilities in creating new wallets and then transferring coins, which could be a bit cumbersome to carry out.

One of the issues that I had considered with the hidden passphrase is that if your device gets confiscated and security is able to get your seed off of it, yet if there is a bit of time, you can move the coins prior to their breaking into it, if you are not detained, yet if you are detained then they have more time to break into your device... various forms of encryption and/or secure elements might be helpful in those regards to the extent that some of us  are sufficiently comfortable with the employment of such systems.. or even needing to learn about such encryption systems.

You are right about that they will make it difficult for you to enter the country if you don't cooperate because they must make sure everything is safe both what is coming to the country and what is going out of the country but if we take look at it very well, checking on someone app is not their duty, I don't hold something valuable of BTC in your app is illegal unless the agent wants to collect a bribe with you and start doing some unnecessary searching, nothing can be hidden in the wallet if not a coin, any agent who asks for your phone and wants to check your wallet is not an agent, he is a criminal or he is a thief because I don't know what they looking for in someone private saved, but it depends on the country you are living or the kind of agents the rules guide your country.

The best way to be safe with the agent even when they enter your phone and would not find anything is to save your seed phrase somewhere else, if you have someone you trust like your dad or mom you can write it and send it to them as a message and also send your coin to someone who you trust after you have passed the agent checkpoints or getting to another country the person can send you your coin and you can also go through the message you send to who you trust and get your seed phrase to be able to have access to your wallet without any stress.

Seriously, we are talking about cold wallet. If you tell a safe person about your secret keys, then you are doing by far the worst job for your asset's safety. The whole purpose of cold wallet is that it's a wallet that only you can access. If someone knows keys or the place where you hide keys, then doesn't matter, it's not a safe wallet anymore because no one knows what another person will do with it. Yes, you might trust your friend but it's far riskier than depending on your own memory.

It's not only about compromised accounts. Cloud is someone else's computer, right? So by making yourself dependent on Cloud Service, you depend on 3rd party. There is a chance that Google will have an accident and lose some of your data that you stored on Gdrive.

The "correct" second password mustn't be brute-forced, correct?
Which means it must be a complex one.
Which also means it must be stored somewhere, because otherwise you risk forgetting it.
So you must take the password with you, along with your encrypted disk.
There are significant chances that they will manage to retrieve the password from you and then, they have their ways to make you admit that you have a secret partition.

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I 've read all the answers and there are some very fancy ideas, like the t-shirt one.
But! I strongly believe that the best idea is to bring 2-3 books with you and write the 12 words in random pages in these books.

Maybe you should have a safe person where you have said to check a specific place where you can show them that you indeed have bitcoin and ways to access it. It should be someone you trust of course which would be difficult to find for sure but legality needs to come in here so that you can make sure that that trusted person will only access the funds when you have been injured.

Definitely not. I have seen way too many google accounts being compromised for me to trust them enough to store anything sensitive. Not to mention that google is way too centralized for my liking. They use our information for algorithm so I won’t be too surprised about what else they can share and use.

That's why you use encrypted disk/files with hidden partitions (like VeraCrypt can do). If forced to decrypt you just give the standard password which decrypts to some wallet with only minimal value in it. The hidden partition is impossible to detect/prove and only accessible with the correct second password. When they seize your hardware you still have dozens of backups at home, online, whatever in the same encrypted container.