Topic: What would be the best way to get through customs at an airport with your Btc? - page 3. (Read 2126 times)

Of course, you should never trust your own memory when it comes to such sensitive information, but if it is something that should be remembered only in the short term, I don't see that it should be a problem for most. However, it is the decision of each individual and everyone should take the risk on themselves when it comes to their digital assets.

It's very individual. For those who have ADHD or are inattentive, it won't be a reliable solution but those who believe in their mental abilities, they can do it. Btw I have read many times on Bitcointalk that it's not recommended to make yourself dependent on your memory in this case.

I think that OP will be safe if he travels with his computer. If I remember correctly, he wants to move in Europe. I've traveled in EU a couple of times but their customs were always great in my case. I can't imagine any custom asking you to open your PC, then force you to type password and then do a deep scan of your computer files. As far as I know, their priority are guns and drugs, besides that they don't care
A friend of mine has migraines and when I visit him in Europe, he asks me to bring one particular NSAID to him. This NSAID I'm talking about is legal and without prescription in my country but illegal in his country (it's an NSAID that's very harsh on the liver) but I never ever had a problem with customs about moving with this medicine.

Btw Australia is the harshest place to travel regarding customs checks, but if you don't tell anyone about your Bitcoin holdings, no one will know about it.

I think that regardless of the fact that there are a lot of fancy methods that could work at customs, it might be best to temporarily store the seed in your memory, especially if we will do a wallet recovery relatively soon after leaving the airport. If someone has a problem remembering 12 words, maybe he could try to remember only 6 of them, and save the other half on a piece of paper that can look like a list of things to buy or something similar.

What I would never do is carry a hardware wallet with you, or have wallets installed on your smartphone or computer, especially if you are traveling to countries like the US, Canada or Australia that have very aggressive security in their airports when it comes to customs, especially if you come from countries that are on their suspicious lists.

We're talking about the scenario of hiding the fact that you own Bitcoin. Disk encryption will prevent your wallet from being found. You could even use a hidden encrypted partition. There are countless ways of doing this.

That would depend on the wallet software itself and whether it leaves around master public keys and addresses encrypted or if they encrypt everything.

I think Bitcoin Core for example encrypts just the private keys (but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), and leaves the public keys alone. I don't exactly remember the columns its using but I do know there are a lot of key-related fields.

They'll only know your addresses if they have (watch-only) access to your wallet. If you're trying to hide the fact that you own Bitcoin, you've failed at this point

The hardware wallet might get confiscated, if there isn't a hardware wallet but it's on any of your devices then they might seize all of those too.

Sure, unless you were dim-witted enough to not password-protect your wallet and write down your seed when you were creating your wallet, you probably have an offline copy somewhere, but even if you do manage to transfer the coins out later, they are going to place your destination address on a list for sure.

why not just declare your bitcoin that you are travelling with. if you own more than $10,000 worth it is probably a prudent thing to do since they have that type of rule with cash. i think where people go wrong is not declaring their money and then it gets confiscated from them they lose it. just because you declare your money if it's more than $10,000 doesn't mean you are going to lose it. but one sure way to lose it is to not declare it.

Hmm, that might work.  You could also march right up the the customs official and immediately proclaim "there's no bitcoin here, officer.  Nope, not a single satoshi."


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This gets me thinking, tattoo your seed on the inside of your eyelids!  Damn, I'm brilliant sometimes.



Are you sure about that?

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After reading all the responses, if it were me I would just encrypt my seed with PGP and store it on my own cloud server (using nextcloud for example.)  My funds would be in a wallet with a passphrase that I remember and wouldn't need to store digitally.  That way I only have to remember my PGP password and my passphrase.  Once I reach the destination I would move my funds to a seed that never saw the light of digitization.

For the duration of time it takes you to travel to your destination and preform the logistical steps to recover your funds, it's highly unlikely that some one would have the time to hack your server, crack your PGP, and and crack your passphrase.  You wouldn't even have to use your own server, that's overkill.  Google drive would suffice for that short of a period.

Head cinema: priceless! 

I actually had to create a meme in honor of ovcijisir 's amazing post:


Twitter link



amazing shirt  

But beyond that, I think we have covered a lot of ways to do what the OP was looking to do.

Pushing the tech side a bit more, how about running your own node at home with funds and then just using a remote access program to log into it and then sending the funds to your wallet on your phone (or wherever) once you get where you are going. In theory you never went though customs with BTC.

Not really secure since you now have a PC that is online with BTC stored on it with some form of remote access but if you are more concerned with passing through security then about security it's not that bad a concept.

Pushing past that there you can setup a wallet on your phone / device and use a time-lock transaction to send to it. If someone looks at your phone they would see a wallet with nothing in it and then at some time in the future funds would be sent.

-Dave

that's like asking for double the trouble. turning a small crime into a huge one. transporting bitcoin accross the border might be seen as a small crime but doing it in  a way that makes it look like you're smuggling drugs? extra dumb. don't pass go, go directly to prison.

After following this topic and seeing some answers, I have come to the following conclusion:

If you want to cross a country's border and are afraid that customs will take your piece of paper, use:

Encryption: encrypt the mnemonic phrase using AES, GPG, use a hidden drive encrypted with veracrypt, transport the encrypted file on a pen drive, transfer it to the cloud (it's highly unlikely that you will access, for example, your Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. account). Make sure to use a strong password, but you will have another job to do, which is to remember this password or write it down offline in a safe place. But the advantage is that a password will not attract as much attention as a sequence of 12/24 words.

Seed division using shamir backup (slip-39) is something that I would not recommend at this time, despite the advantages offered, I've not yet tested this feature, in addition to having more work to store and carry a bunch of recovery papers of 3-5 for example, it would not be useful when traveling internationally.

Another strategy would be to keep copies of the mnemonic phrase (encrypted or not) with a relative or friend in the destination country. In this case, it's essential to add a BIP-39 Passphrase so that you don't run the risk of having it stored by the custodian for the time being. Using a passphrase has already been discussed extensively here, so it would be the most obvious solution and I'll not go into much detail about it.

I found this strategy very interesting, but don't doubt too much about the possibility of being discovered if you are (very, very) unlucky enough to have a customs guard on a bad day and want to search all your things.

I still think the strategy of using seed-otp for encryption is the best of all, because in addition to creating plausible deniability even if they discover that you carry a seed with you, it is a totally random seed of your original seed that can only return to the original state using the source otp key, you can still use steganography to hide this phrase.

It spiraled a little out of control due to misunderstanding.

Back on topic about hiding private keys. I remembered how I kept some notes hidden when I was little. I disassembled pen and made little scroll out of pittle piece of paper. Then I would put it in pen's tube and assembled pen back together. If the pen has opaque tube it will be pretty hard to discover the note.

If I would be really paranoid I would use lemon juice to make invisible ink and write seed words with it. After arrival to destination I would recreate the wallet. By applying heat from the lighter seed words would appear and it would be possible to write them in wallet app.

How did a tech topic turn into a social topic? Sarcasm is best when you don't point it out, and even better if people aren't sure whether you're being sarcastic or really mean it

I guess that lockdowns and isolation took toll on people's social skills.



We shouldn't forget closing tags too, so the joke syntax is correct. It could produce error message if used in incorrect format.

Based on my personal experience so far crossing country borders, customs or security at airports, it would be perfectly safe to write recovery words on my underwear with some cloth marker. Enough space there and I never had to expose it, nor was anyone interested to inspect my underwear.

The most intrusive experience I had were those by-hand inspections at airport security when the metal or whatever detector decided to flag me for manual inspection. The touching security officer never cared of any small piece of paper I had in my trouser pockets or any pieces of clothes below the visible outer layer.

I'm aware that my own experience can't be generalized and isn't a foolproof plan. Simply avoid anything that hints to crypto currencies or that you might know or do something with Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatnot other shitcoins.

And I try to avoid crossing borders of countries with vastly unpredictable and arbitrary "methods" at customs, security or police.

If you're paranoid, you need some elaborate scheme. If you're, I'd like to say, rational, it's no big deal, see above or other less complicated methods of transport mentioned earlier in this thread.

My little extra paranoia tells me to always use an additional mnemonic passphrase when you transport your mnemonic recovery words "in the more or less open". Should your mnemonic recovery words get exposed by whatever unlikely event during transport, your wallet would still be safe and hidden by your additional mnemonic passphrase (the 13^th or 25^th added secret).
It should be easy to memorize the additional mnemonic passphrase and carry it also written and well hidden with you as failsafe backup should your brain memory fail you for whatever reason.

Haha, that was funny. The reason why I think that invisible ink is riskier is that you have to write on paper with it and then keep this paper saved safe somewhere or you can write it down on the note, that's safe. By the way, you also need UV lights to see what's written. What if you are in a hurry and don't have access to UV lights? That's why I prefer a label tag on a t-shirt. It's knitted on the T-shirt with needle and fibre, it's not going to be lost and it's with you on your T-shirt. You can doff it anytime and restore your wallet.
No one is going to steal your t-shirt as you wear it. Btw don't wear Armani Exchange or Calvin Klein, that's a little riskier

What pros and cons do you see in both ideas? I would love to hear that from you too.

Just don't tell them? BTC isn't something physical so if you are not stupid enough to write it on your forehead that you have bitcoins, nobody will notice anything. You could carry a million bitcoins in a usb disk. Nobody will know it. Your wallet is literally a text file which carries your public keys or seed words. If you don't even want to carry a usb stick, then memorize your words and it will be even better. With bitcoin&crypto, unless you make stupid moves, you can't fail. In fact, you need to try very hard.