How to keep your Bitcoin safe when you have to leave the house
The world is becoming an increasingly unstable place politically and economically. Many people around the world currently live in places that pose serious risks to their livelihoods and well-being. Everything is serious, from a totalitarian and persecutory government to an overall economic condition so deteriorating that its ability to sustain itself is called into question.
This puts people in the dire position of having to choose whether to continue to overcome the situation and retain their possessions, or leave most of what they own behind to flee an abusive government or a devastated economy. If you’re lucky enough to even have the financial and practical ability to leave in the first place. You cannot take large amounts of cash or gold, they will be confiscated at the border. Your bank account balance may be completely limited. This means that, in most cases, you will be immediately locked out, even if you technically have access to it globally.
You can’t bring your home, you can’t drive it where you’re going, you can’t bring your car (even if you own a car), and you can’t bring any significant physical assets. All you can carry is what you can carry on your back or in a few bags. Bitcoin completely changes this dynamic. It’s a vehicle that can transport you across borders, no matter how much wealth you have stored.
All you need is to take a dozen words with you across the border in some form. That’s all you need to bring wealth when things get so bad that you have no choice but to run. Here are some of the best options:
border wallet
Border Wallets is a very interesting initiative that takes advantage of the way people’s brains work with visual memory. This tool provides a way to generate a two-dimensional grid of all possible seed words. This can be generated in a few different ways, but we recommend that anyone using this tool use the deterministic generation mechanism. This way, in the worst case scenario, if you lose your copy of the seed word grid, you can regenerate the same grid if necessary.
You can then fill in this grid using any recognizable or memorable pattern. Humans are very visual animals, and the reality of how our minds work is that visual patterns are much easier for the average person to remember than words. After creating a grid, users can select words on the grid with recognizable patterns that are easy to recognize. It’s very important to remember the order you need to follow to actually turn this into a seed phrase.. That is, are you following all the highlighted words consecutively from left to right and then moving down each line? Do you want to go down each column from top to bottom and then move to the right column?
Recognizable shapes include circles, squares, and even Bitcoin B. With the ability to recreate identical grids, easily recognizable patterns, and the order of turning highlighted words into seed phrases, Border Wallet provides a powerful tool specifically designed to relieve you of the mental burden of having to remember seed phrases.
This allows you to cross borders without having anything identifiable associated with your Bitcoin. Remember this before you actually go on your trip. test. As you go through the process of creating a word grid, make sure you can properly recreate the same grid. Create a test pattern, set it aside, then come back and see if the pattern you remember hits the same word seed.
Once you’ve tested and confirmed that you can recreate everything properly, you can travel abroad confident that your Bitcoins are safe and accessible when you arrive at your destination.
samurai wallet
In addition to Whirlpool, a CoinJoin implementation, and other privacy features, Samourai Wallet has a specific feature that has existed in some form since the beginning of the project: stealth mode. This is an invaluable feature in situations where you need to cross borders.
A mobile application can obscure the fact that it is a Bitcoin wallet altogether. The logos have been changed to masquerade as various applications, and any indication that Samurai Wallet is being installed is obscured. It can work as a calculator app, VPN app, QR scanner, or notepad. Each fake application works and, when launched, looks like a bait app of the user’s choice. Each bait app hides various mechanisms that actually allow you to open your Samourai Wallet and access your Bitcoins.
It is important to note that this will not withstand forensic analysis of your device. This means that if you confiscate it and physically examine it using computer forensics software, they will be able to find out that you have a Bitcoin wallet installed. However, if you are manually inspecting your device (which is much more common when inspections are performed), you must not give customs officials any indication that a Bitcoin wallet is installed on your device.
steganography
Steganography is a technique for hiding data or information within other information. A good example of this is hiding information inside a JPEG. A variety of digital tools can be used to take secret information, such as a text document or Bitcoin seed phrase, and insert it into a jpeg. A JPEG may look completely normal with no changes to the visual image, but the file itself contains secret information that can be extracted by anyone who knows the file exists.
Now, this requires putting the seed phrase into your computer to encode and embed it, and using tools that aren’t very user-friendly (although there are web-based tools for this kind of thing). never If you want to handle seed phrases or private keys, use something like this.) But the general idea is one that can be useful.
Do you have any books? Any book? If so, go through it page by page and see if you can find the words in the seed phrase you created in the correct order through the pages of the book. If that’s possible, you’ve found something you can use to safely transport your seed phrase without anyone getting suspicious. Go through the book and highlight the words that make up the seed phrase (in that order) as you find them. complete.
If you pass through a border checkpoint with a completely innocuous-looking book, you might find that it has your Bitcoin savings hidden inside.
Memorization
I specifically mention this last because all of the other options presented above are much safer for most people. Especially considering that Border Wallet is a system set up specifically to help people memorize their seed phrases in a more secure way. If you can’t do that for some reason, memorizing the seed phrase verbatim can be an option.
However, I would like to emphasize that this is very dangerous for many people. If you go this way very careful. Test yourself several times, memorize the phrase and then don’t look at it for a week. Repeat it in your head every day. At the end of this period, write down what you remember and compare it to the original. Do this a few times.
As the time to leave approached, As soon as you get to your destination, record it again as soon as possible and make a physical copy.. This is by no means the best or safest option for transporting Bitcoin keys across borders. But sometimes people find themselves in situations where their options are limited. This should be a last resort.
final thoughts
The above list of tools for transporting your seed phrases across borders is by no means complete. There are several different options for how to do this, and they all have trade-offs in terms of risk of loss or detection. I’m sure many of you reading this could come up with your own ways to do that if you put your mind to it.
The options here were chosen for their reliability, simplicity and safety against losses. If you feel the need or desire to try a more complicated or home-made method for transporting seeds, we recommend the following: extreme Be careful when doing so. The above options should be applicable and useful in most situations people might find themselves in, and are some of the safest ways to do so.
Keep these tools in mind: It could one day make the difference between starting over in poverty and starting over somewhere with your accumulated wealth intact.
