Topic: What would be the best way to get through customs at an airport with your Btc? - page 5. (Read 2126 times)

Let's do this, my seed phrase is surprise peace famous office settle romance fatigue wood snack episode occur atom.
I write a letter about a 1. surprise I bought for my wife, but forgot at my 4. office. Then I take a picture of a 3. famous 2. peace advocate. I add a small subtle 6. romance text to an old picture of my wife, remembering when we 5. settled down. Just in case, I'll just remember words 7 and 8, and create a similar system for the remaining words. Of course, I restore the original file date on all edited files.
Now that I think about it, just memorizing the words is probably easier

I guess they have some sort of software that scans for specific types of files. I believe any .gpg, .txt, .asc, .exe file would be more suspicious than a .jpg or .png. I mean, obviously, you can find places to hide your data. Nobody would ever try to manually check 1TB of data. At the same time, automatically scanning using software is faster (good for them) but has security holes (good for the people who want to hide sensitive information)

Don't feed the troll

If you carry (give or take) 1 TB of data with you, a seed phrase is about 0.000000001% of that. I can think of so many ways to just hide a few bytes in that mountain of data, that it would take a very long time to find if you don't know where to look.

it's statistically rare to get hacked on your computer but does that mean we should just store our private keys on the hard drive? probably not right?



it all depends. if they find you suspicious and get a search warrant then they can seize your phone for forensic analysis.

Loyce meant that it's statistically rarer to be searched at the customs.

Personally, I have never been searched and, none of my friends have ever been searched. But! Of course it happens.

The question is, in what depth does the search go to? I mean, do they scrutinize your objects (& devices) or do they just do an ordinary check?

it has happened. just because it hasn't happened to you doesn't mean it doesn't happen to other people.

Agreed, it's probably a gray area. What if for instance the private key is encrypted and I don't have the key with me?

You're probably right, although it could be argued that e.g. a physical coin with a prepaid balance and a seed phrase (or qr code) hidden inside of it would potentially fall under declarable goods, as whoever owns it would have access to those bitcoins. It wouldn't be quite the same as having internet bank account. So potentially the method of storing bitcoins could matter for crossing a border.
I suspect in some countries that could still be a grey area and subject to customs officers' interpretation.

As DaveF mentioned, steganography techniques can be more interesting than other complicated methods, but before hiding a message as a seed in an image, you won't do it with a bare seed without protection, you can add a passphrase, but I wouldn't do that in this case.

One of the techniques I've been studying is seed-otp, which consists of creating a multifactor authentication key, this key combined with your mnemonic phrase creates a new list of words indistinguishable from your original mnemonic phrase, which is nothing more than your encrypted seed, but instead of the encrypted output in cyphertext with a sequence of unreadable random bytes, this method uses words similar to the BIP39 wordlist to encode your original mnemonic phrase. You could stop here, but you would still have to explain to the customs guard why you still carry a list with 12/24 words (if this ever really happens, the chances of it happening I believe are very low).

With the mnemonic phrase encrypted by seed-otp, you can load this information into an image by embedding it and optionally inserting a password. There are several applications that fulfill this function, one of them is OpenStego (I haven't used any others). This way, you can save the image that carries the secret of your encrypted wallet on your smartphone, pen drive or any other media device that carries images. This way, there is no way to suspect a simple image, even if you inspect your device (I've never seen this happen).

You must remember your OTP key responsible for restoring the mnemonic phrase to its original state. To do this, you can save this key in a keepass file or another password manager of your choice or write it down on a piece of paper, since it won't draw attention in the same way as a list of words known to be a bitcoin wallet mnemonic.

Here is an example step-by-step:

1st let's say you create a new mnemonic phrase or use an existing one, download the html file from the seed tools page (the process is similar to iancoleman), after everything is ready, create or insert your recovery seed:





2nd Go to "Select a Bitcoin Tool" and select the "One Time Pad" option, below there will be a "One Time pad key" field containing an otp key, if you prefer, you can generate a new otp key by clicking on "New Key".





3rd After creating the otp-key, click on "encrypt" and a new list of words similar to a mnemonic will be created, it is nothing more than your encrypted mnemonic.




Ex:
My original mnemonic:

My otp-key:

My encrypted one time pad seed:

It is essential that you know the original mnemonic, have it written down or memorized (regardless of the method, memorize your mnemonic in addition to having it written down), save the otp-key and the one-time-pad encrypted seed so that we can test it and verify that it returns to the original state of your seed upon arrival at the airport and at your final destination.

To do this, reload the page, select "one time Pad" again, paste your otp-key in the "One Time Pad Key" field, paste/type your mnemonic phrase encrypted by One Time Pad and click "DECRYPT".

The final result is your original mnemonic phrase 

Generally, i agree with Andreas. Although each people would choose different security/ease-of-use trade-off. Video shared by @apogio is still suitable for those who're familiar with setup and maintaining server.


I think you forget to mention that you need to store the device or other medium which used store the private key/seed securely. Unless you have property on point "B", you probably have to place the device/other medium on someone's else building.

It's going into semantics, but there is no Bitcoin in a wallet. Bitcoin is on the blockchain. I don't see the point of creating a wallet on your destination before funding it. Even worse: that creates new points of failure: the wallet can be compromised while you're not there.

I think the safest way to go through airport customs with bitcoin is when you have NOTHING with you that can be linked to bitcoin (no seed phrase, no hardware wallets, no pre-installed wallets on laptops and phones).

I'll explain how I imagine it (but this will only work if you've already visited the point of arrival and departure, i.e. the point of arrival is not new).

Point "A" (point of departure): as usual, you create a BTC-wallet with a secure storage of the seed phrase.
Point "B" (point of arrival): a BTC-wallet with a secure storage of the seed phrase has been created in advance.
Before the flight from point "A" to point "B" you make a transaction from the 1st wallet to the 2nd and by the time of arrival, your bitcoin will already be in the wallet, and at customs you will not have anything incriminating related to the bitcoin (in case of a detailed inspection).

But this option is not suitable for emergency (unscheduled) flights.

You mean like this?

It's truly challenging for normal users.

I watched some videos of Andreas Antonopoulos in which he advised that people should never complicate their back up methods too much because it can result in more complex recovery procedure. In worst case, if recovery procedure is broken in the middle by broken piece of initial back ups, the wallet will be lost forever.

Brute force a Bitcoin private key or wallet is almost impossible and the bottom line is keep your back up simple.

Some people choose seed splitting which is risky and not recommended.
Seed splitting is a bad idea.

I only briefly see the 1st part ("Personal Server"). But since it involve using PGP and setting server where you access it with .onion rather than plain IP address, average people would find it challenging. You're expected to ensure the server remains on and connected to internet, before you move elsewhere and access it remotely. While you could rent VPS for that task, some trust is required even though you store the encrypted data (seed, pass, etc.).

Not bad but for that I prefer the option I mentioned before, write the seeds in invisible ink in a book and then make it visible upon arrival at the destination to restore the wallet.


I think that's almost a couple of hours in total but thanks, I'll watch them.

There is a video series on YouTube which is fantastic! I watched it just for fun, but I would to like to hear someone else's opinion on that, perhaps after actually trying it.

"Escape with your Bitcoin":

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWGXdn3sdp8
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMQupuGpSsw
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1urPLr83Ojg

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.