Topic: What would be the best way to get through customs at an airport with your Btc? - page 5. (Read 1645 times)

It still carries a certain amount of risk. What if your luggage gets lost or stolen in the process? You could lose access to your wallet and funds. Hopefully, you should have backups in safe locations, but then youre back to square one.

Its a creative idea, though. 

If you are going to do it that way just embed the info in a legitimate image using something like this:
https://pypi.org/project/cryptosteganography/

Many other options available to do it.

Even if someone looks through every image it still will not matter unless they try to decode / decrypt every image.

I really don't think anyone is going to bother going that deep unless you are on some list. And if you are it probably does not matter anyway they already know what you have.

-Dave

I kinda like the creative idea as long as there's enough space to write 12x 4-char-abbreviations of the mnemonic recovery words. They should be unique with four first characters. To be on the safe side, I'd protect the wallet with an additional mnemonic passphrase, just in case things go really south at the security check or whereever at customs border crossing.

Be sure to use a permanent cloth pen and recover the wallet before you wash your t-shirt again. Or check multiple washing cycles before you rely on durability of this type of backup medium.

On the label tag, mate.
Who is going to read this in the airport?


Keep in mind that many t-shirts have it inside in the middle part of the the body.

Good luck explaining to the armed guy at customs why you wrote "armed assault monkey" on your t-shirts You see what I'm going at

If I were you, this is what I would do. If I were changing living, I would probably risk moving with a Hardware wallet but since this can be an issue, I would go this way - Your t-shirt has a label tag inside. Create a wallet with 12 seed phrases, transfer coins to this wallet, then write down 12 seed phrases on your t-shirt's label tags (mine has multiple) and when you move in another country, buy a brand new hardware wallet, restore the wallet and destroy the t-shirt.

Be frank, isn't it very creative? And safe?


You can also not declare. Who is going to know that you hold Bitcoins that are worth more than 10K euros? No one will know. That law also applies exclusively to cash as far as I know.

That's how I see and perceive it, too. I never had real issues when crossing borders, though my sample space isn't that large.

When I had a laptop in my hand luggage, it got x-rayed and I had to "prove" it's not a bomb by showing the security it turns on and "behaves" like a normal laptop. My mobile phone was never touched nor inspected nor did I have to show anything on it.

People supporting Edward Snowden or Julian Assange are likely treated differently, especially when crossing USA or other very USA devoted countries' borders.

We discuss here a topic with premisses set by OP. My assumption here is, you need to cross borders with all your coins you possess. Yes, I know, we don't carry the coins, we have to carry all details necessary to recover all our private keys that control all our coins. Whatever you do upfront to minimize those needed recovery details, is up to you.

If I'm paranoid and don't want to give any hint that I have Bitcoin, I wouldn't carry a hardware wallet with me, even when it's factory reset. I can't assume, any security or border personal doesn't know how the most common hardware wallets look like. If I want to minimize risk, I don't stretch my luck.

And this here isn't only about digital devices. Anything is valid, be it digital or analog or carved into your wet brain memory. The latter is risky, human memory is a fragile thing, keep this in mind (pun intended).

They have rights to do this but they super rarely do it.

Except if you are recognized by them as a threat like a terrorist and the like by true or mistaken, they will not touch you and search your electronic devices. Risk exists but not too big.

I like the idea to uninstall wallet applications on my electronic devices and have my seed phrase in a book and in brain. If it is only for traveling, I have little reasons to bring my big wallet, all my bitcoin around and across borders, airports. By bringing a small hot wallet through traveling, I reduce risk of losing all my bitcoin.

How many people here have actually had their electronic devices searched by customs? I don't know anyone who's had that experience.

Apparently I wasn't specific enough. I didn't mean to have 30 encrypted microSD cards, only very few have actually encrypted stuff on them, the others you could fill with music files or whatever you like.

When you travel e.g. with a digital camera, having a lot of storage cards doesn't raise eyebrows and suspicion. Carrying a lot of cards should make it a pain for the border customs folks to inspect or even copy them all. People might be lazy...

Anyway, it was just an idea. There are much simpler, non-digital ways to transport wallet recovery data safely and likely unsuspiciously through border customs.

My point is: make a list of how your valuable data could be found or inspected and try to find reasonable mitigation which isn't easy to spot and involves unsuspicious items almost every voyager carries or uses. Books, personal diaries, small phone number notebook, yadda, yadda, ...

That's not "pi" the number, it said you could solve this on a Raspberry Pi. But knowing nullius, it's far too much work to account for all potential iterations.
Anyway, that's not BIP38

Well, 0.01 BTC is still sitting on a brainwallet with "pi" number: https://mempool.space/address/bc1qt2mdkehmphggajer3ur3g8l754scj4fdrmw3rn

I'd say bringing 30 encrypted SD cards is overcomplicating things

It reminds me of this thread: $1000 was not enough to brute-force just 6 simple characters for years while the encrypted key was posted. I wouldn't dare do this in reality though, but I'm pretty sure it would be secure.

Forsyth Jones brings up a decent strategy, but to differ a bit from his suggestion you could just use GnuPG to encrypt a text file with the seed phrase in it, and store the encrypted file on a cloud server until you reach your destination.  You could also encrypt a passphrase the same way and store it in a different way, such as send it to yourself in a email that's operated by company other than the cloud service, or yet another cloud provider.

That way all you have to remember is the password for your PGP key, and you have nothing on your person or in your luggage that suggests you own bitcoin.

I would rather trust an open source solution such as GPG/PGP than a third party software or an entire OS on a USB stick, and again you wouldn't have anything with you that could prompt questions.

It is possible that they just disposed it because it contained food ingredients which aren't allowed to be imported in certain countries. Some countries simply don't allow you to import meat or dairy products or whatnot else.

On the other hand, yes, could've been the simplest explanation: someone was hungry and abused the situation to their advantage.


Back to topic: I probably wouldn't try too fancy hiding like color coding or such.

Using a pocket translation dictionary and unsuspiciously marking the recovery words shouldn't be much noticable. Take redundancy into account! Your luggage can get lost, so have redundant copies in your hand luggage, briefcase or trouser pockets, too.

When you use a strong optional mnemonic passphrase to protect your real wallet, you don't need to worry too much about having your mnemonic recovery words in more or less plain sight.

Just make an assessment of the worst possible issues or loss situations at border crossing or during your journey that can arise and think about proper mitigation.

You can also have thirty or more microSD cards, all of decent size and with encrypted files on them (decent sizes to make a copy attempt noticable due to time consumption needed). Only two or so (redundantly!) have encrypted volumes with what's valuable for you. The decryption key may be only strong enough for the period of your journey. You have it well and unsuspiciously hidden in multiple places in your various luggages, you have it also in your brain.

Don't overcomplicate things or you shoot yourself in the foot.

Yeah, but you can probably define a certain offset to make it harder. If you're storing your seeds on the computer, the environment should be secure and your only concern should ideally only be whoever is trying to search your computer.

Agreed on the printing part though, don't think it steganography works particularly well if you're transferring between different mediums.

There are unimaginable ways to travel with Bitcoin without being detected by customs authorities or in any case that you consider it harmful to safeguard your coins.

The first of them, as has been said a lot here, is the additional passphrase to the recovery phrase, you can choose whether or not to load the passphrase written somewhere that doesn't attract attention, such as on a page of a book or memorize it temporarily, at least less for the duration of the trip while the copy of the passphrase remains safe in your country of origin.

You can load a pen drive or micro-sd card with bootable Linux live or even with taisOS installed, enable persistent storage to encrypt it or use a simpler option such as a simple keepass .kdbx file with its encrypted passphrase (protected by master password) or you can just save your recovery phrase in it, choose whether or not to configure a passphrase.

For desktop, a very good option is to use veracrypt, where you must create two encrypted volumes, one being a hidden storage where your wallet backup files will be saved (wallet.dat, electrum file etc.) and a decoy container where you will use it if you are required to provide your password.

If you want to load your wallet on your cell phone, on bluewallet you can create hidden encrypted storages (similar to veracrypt containers), where you configure a password for each storage and can use one of them as a decoy if you are forced to hand over the password (plausible deniability) to configure wallets with funds so as not to attract attention, while the second storage only you will know the password and there is no way for anyone to know if there is a hidden storage where your wallet that you want to protect is configured.

They can search your electronics if you go through hard secondary (i.e. if you lie to them about the contents of your bag, where and why you're going and such). There is also "soft secondary" where you might be selected at random to go through, see below.

Regular customs just a few seconds to get through, no more than a couple of minutes in case they send you to secondary and ask you questions about your bags and your destination. Just tell them you have a hardware wallet in there, you don't have to tell them how much unless they ask.


Israeli customs is the worst (i.e. one of the most sophisticated in the world), they are notorious for having all kinds of tools for detecting anything. So definitely don't try to mislead them.

Oh and before I forget - most countries do confiscate a lot of different foods because they can inadvertently carry deadly viruses.

At the risk of further derailing this conversion, your argument assumes that militants only target the method of transportation and not some building or person at the destination.  The specific circumstance that you witnessed might be as you described it, merely someone looking for a free meal.

Many years ago during one trip into the West Bank with my kids, crossing in from Jordan, we were detained by Israeli customs because we had packed my son's intubator into his bag.  It's an implement for administering albuterol treatments incase of an asthma attack.  We had reached our destination, but there was still a risk the machine would be confiscated by customs.  Luckily one of the customs officials recognized it for what it was, and even better we didn't need it on that trip.

This was upon arrival, so the C4 argument doesn't matter. Someone just wanted a free meal.