The world is becoming an increasingly unstable place politically and economically speaking. Many people around the world currently live in places that pose serious risks to their livelihoods and well-being, from totalitarian and persecutory governments to the deterioration of the overall state of the economy so severely that their ability to support themselves is in doubt.
This puts people in a terrible position, having to choose between continuing to resist the situation and keep their possessions, or leaving behind most of what they own to flee abusive governments or a destroyed economy. If they are lucky enough to have the financial and practical ability to leave in the first place. You cannot bring large amounts of cash or gold, they will be confiscated at the border. Bank account balances can be completely restricted, meaning that although they can technically be accessed globally in most cases, they can be locked in an instant.
You can't bring your house, you can't bring your car unless you can drive where you're going (if you own one), you can't bring any significant physical assets. The only thing you can take with you is what you can carry on your back or in some bags. bitcoin completely changes this dynamic. It is a vehicle that can transport any amount of wealth you have stored in it across any border.
All that is required is that, one way or another, you take twelve words with you across the border. That's all you need to bring your wealth with you if you find yourself in a situation where things are going bad enough that you have no choice but to flee. These are some of the best options.
Border wallets
Border wallets It is a very interesting scheme that takes advantage of how people's brains work with visual memory. The tools provide a way to generate a two-dimensional grid of all possible seed words. This can be generated in different ways, but I would recommend that anyone using this tool use the deterministic generation mechanism. This ensures that in the worst case scenario, if you lose your copy of the seed word grid, you can regenerate it if necessary.
This grid can then be completed using a 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 memorize than words. After generating the grid, users can select words on the grid in a recognizable pattern that is easy to recognize. It is vitally important to remember the order you are going to follow to turn this into an opening phrase.. That is, are you following all the highlighted words from left to right in a row and then down each row? Are you going to go down each column from top to bottom and then to the right column?
Recognizable shapes are great, a circle, a square, even a bitcoin B. With the ability to regenerate the same grid, an easily recognizable pattern that you can fill in, and the order in which to turn those highlighted words into a seed phrase, Border Las wallets present a powerful tool designed specifically to alleviate the mental burden of keeping a seed phrase memorized.
This should allow you to cross an international border without anything identifiable that is related to bitcoin. Just remember, before you take the trip, try things. Run the word grid creation process and make sure you can successfully regenerate the same grid. Create a test pattern and set it aside, then go back and make sure the pattern you remember hits the same seed word.
Once you've run the tests and verified that you can regenerate everything correctly, you can make the trip out of the country with confidence that your bitcoin is safe and accessible when you arrive at your destination.
Samurai wallet
Samourai Wallet, in addition to its Whirlpool coin-matching implementation and other privacy features, has one particular feature that has been around almost since the beginning of the project in one form or another: stealth mode. This is an incredibly valuable feature in a situation where you must cross an international border.
The mobile app can be configured to hide everything related to the fact that it is a bitcoin wallet. The logo is changed to disguise itself as several different apps, and all signs that Samourai Wallet is installed are obscured. It can work as a calculator app, VPN app, QR scanner or notepad. Each fake app is functional and, when launched, appears to be any decoy app that the user selects. Each decoy app has a different hidden mechanism to open Samourai Wallet and access your bitcoin.
It is important to note that this will not stand up to any forensic analysis of your device. That is, if it is seized and inspected using forensic software, they will be able to discover the fact that there is a bitcoin wallet installed. However, a manual inspection of your device (which is much more common if any inspection is performed) should not give any signal to the customs agent that a bitcoin wallet is installed on your device.
steganography
Steganography is the technique of hiding data or information within other information. A good example of this is hiding information within a jpeg file. It is possible to use different digital tools to take a secret piece of information, such as a text document or a bitcoin seed phrase, and embed it within a jpeg file. The jpeg would look completely normal, with no changes to the visual image, but the file itself would have the secret information included to be extracted by anyone who knew it was there.
Now, this requires putting your seed phrase into a computer to encode and embed it, and requires the use of tools that aren't very user-friendly (there are web-based tools for this sort of thing, but NEVER use something like that to handle your seed phrase or private keys). However, the general concept is something that can be useful.
Do you have a book? Any book? If you do, see if you can go through it page by page and find the words in a seed phrase that you have generated in the correct order across the pages of the book. If you can, you've just found something that can be used to transport your opening phrase safely without anyone suspecting it. Simply read the book and highlight (in order) the words that make up your opening sentence as you encounter them. Made.
You can simply walk through border control with a completely harmless-looking book, knowing that your bitcoin savings are hidden inside it.
Memorization
I mention the latter specifically because all of the other options presented above are much safer for most people, especially since Border Wallets is a system created specifically to help people memorize their seed phrase in a more secure way. In the event that for some reason that is not an option, simply memorizing the opening phrase as is may be a way to go.
But I must emphasize that this is very risky for many people. If you go this route, know Very careful. Test yourself numerous times, memorize your phrase and give yourself a week without looking at it. Repeat it mentally every day. At the end of this period write down what you remember and compare it with the original copy. Do this several times.
When the time comes to leave, As soon as you can after arriving at your destination, write it down again and create a physical copy.. This is by no means the best, nor the most secure, option for transporting your bitcoin keys across a border. But sometimes people find themselves in a situation with limited options. This should be the last resort.
Final thoughts
The above list of tools for transporting your seed phrase across an international border is by no means exhaustive. There are many other options to achieve this, all with their own advantages and disadvantages in terms of risk of loss or detection. I'm sure that if many of you reading this put your mind to it, you can come up with your own methods to do it.
The options here were chosen for their reliability, simplicity and safety against loss. If you feel the need or desire to venture into more complicated or self-created ways to transport your seed, I recommend extreme caution when doing so. The options above should be applicable and useful for the vast majority of situations people may find themselves in, and are some of the safest ways to do this.
Keep these tools in mind, they could one day make the difference between starting over somewhere destitute or starting over somewhere with your accumulated wealth intact.
