What would be the best way to get through customs at an airport with your Btc?

[DireWolfM14]

I was thinking more of moving to another country...

In that case, I would suggest a temporary brain wallet is most secure and least likely to get you in trouble with customs officials.  If you were to start early enough and give yourself time, I'm sure you could remember a 12-word seed phrase.  You could also add a 13th word that you already remember such as the middle name of distant ancestor, or a secure password that you already remember.

Create a phrase offline and it's corresponding watch-only wallet.  Write down the phrase and store it somewhere safe.  Rehearse it silently for a couple of days, only pulling it out of storage when you need a refresher.  After a couple of days restore it offline and compare to the watch only wallet.  Keep that up for a couple of weeks, after which you'll have it memorized with a significant amount of confidence.  Keep up the silent rehearsals and offline restoration checks leading up to your travel date.  Once you're 100% confident in your memorization of the phrase, transfer your coins.  Once you reach your destination you can create a more secure storage scheme, or write down the phrase that you've memorized in case your memory fails in the future.

Most of us have memorized passages from religious texts, prayers, lyrics of our favorite songs, or lines from our favorite movies.  And if it's only for short period of time it shouldn't be difficult to keep it fresh in your memory.  It's more difficult to try to remember something like a seed phrase for years, but for a few days or a week while traveling, a brain wallet is probably the most secure and safe method. 

Certainly safer and more comfortable than using your prison wallet. 

[pooya87]

I had also thought of taking the seeds written in a book or notebook on several pages, but with invisible ink, so that no way that it will occur to customs agents to search through a book of 300 pages.

You can always use an extra word (the passphrase) with your seed phrase for extra security. Something you can remember. It is easier to remember 1 word.

You can also always write down numbers instead of words. Just go to the wordlist page[1] and write down the corresponding number for each word in correct order. For example if the first word is "leaf" and second word is "alien" write down 1014, 51 and so on. Make sure to test what you wrote by recovering your wallet to make sure there is no mistake.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/english.txt

[DecipherBTC]

Seed phrase with a password, so you can store the seed phrase wherever you want aslong as you keep the password separate

[DireWolfM14]

There are lots of good replies here, and I think Pooya87 makes a good point; you could just write down the corresponding number of the word from the word list to obfuscate the words themselves, and just have a strong passphrase to encrypt the wallet.  You could also convert those numbers to hexadecimal values to further obfuscate their meaning.  That should buy you plenty of time reach your destination and create a more secure storage method.

I doubt that most customs officials are looking for evidence of bitcoin these days.  That may change in the future, but for now I think Poker Player might be overthinking the issue.

[LoyceV]

I doubt that most customs officials are looking for evidence of bitcoin these days.  That may change in the future, but for now I think Poker Player might be overthinking the issue.

Depending on the country, I'd be more concerned about unlawful searches. I've been to countries where anything of value (up to cup noodles) gets "confiscated". You don't want those people to suspect you own Bitcoin.

[satscraper]

I think in the best technical way to get through without the agents being able to detect that you have a single satoshi. The most logical would be to memorize the seeds but relying on memory would not leave me 100% at ease. Is there another feasible, safe way?

I'm travelling more than often and    most recently  have    develop a habit to proceed through customs with Tails on SD card the persistent volume of which holds all sensitive information that I need.   The content of persistent volume may be unlocked only with my hardware security key (accessed via PIN) - small dongle on my keying with the bundle of keys from home. Customs pay no attention on this stuff. I think this is feasible and secure way thus reap its benefits after reading this topic.

[pooya87]

I doubt that most customs officials are looking for evidence of bitcoin these days.  That may change in the future, but for now I think Poker Player might be overthinking the issue.

Depending on the country, I'd be more concerned about unlawful searches. I've been to countries where anything of value (up to cup noodles) gets "confiscated". You don't want those people to suspect you own Bitcoin.

Are you talking about the Jewelry Law Europeans have that allows them to confiscate your belongings? I thought that only applied to asylum seekers not every visitor.

[LoyceV]

Are you talking about the Jewelry Law Europeans have that allows them to confiscate your belongings?

No.

[DireWolfM14]

I doubt that most customs officials are looking for evidence of bitcoin these days.  That may change in the future, but for now I think Poker Player might be overthinking the issue.

Depending on the country, I'd be more concerned about unlawful searches. I've been to countries where anything of value (up to cup noodles) gets "confiscated". You don't want those people to suspect you own Bitcoin.

I didn't think of that, but very true.

As for confiscating cups of noodles, that doesn't surprise me at all; they're a notorious way of hiding C4 (plastic) explosive in a seemingly innocent looking package.  If you value your cups of sodium as much as I do, eat them before you arrive at your destination.

[LoyceV]

As for confiscating cups of noodles, that doesn't surprise me at all; they're a notorious way of hiding C4 (plastic) explosive in a seemingly innocent looking package.

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

[DireWolfM14]

As for confiscating cups of noodles, that doesn't surprise me at all; they're a notorious way of hiding C4 (plastic) explosive in a seemingly innocent looking package.

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

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.

[NotATether]

I really don't see any problem with paper wallets, hot/cold wallet on a phone, a seedphrase on a USD stick. I'm not sure where you're from, and I never seen this happening, so I really can't imagine them going through your phone apps. Is that even legal? Also, is this even something you have to do? I mean declaring your bitcoin holdings regardless of the amount?

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.

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.

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.

[Forsyth Jones]

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.

[ranochigo]

Not bad So "1476. reveal" would become 5C4, the color would be #5C45C4. I wouldn't feel safe with a seed stored in "plain color" on a computer though, and printing it means you can't find back the exact color.

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.

[Cricktor]

As for confiscating cups of noodles, that doesn't surprise me at all; ...

This was upon arrival, ... Someone just wanted a free meal.

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.

[DireWolfM14]

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.

[LoyceV]

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.

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

That way all you have to remember is the password for your PGP key

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.

[garlonicon]

I wouldn't dare do this in reality though, but I'm pretty sure it would be secure.

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

[LoyceV]

I wouldn't dare do this in reality though, but I'm pretty sure it would be secure.

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

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

[Cricktor]

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

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, ...