Written By
Stephen Hall
Bitcoin allows you to segregate funds into multiple wallets so you only need to carry the keys you need for smaller amounts of bitcoin. You can secure your bitcoin savings in cold storage multisig, while still carrying some sats in a hot wallet on your phone like BlueWallet or Muun.
By only carrying keys to the wallets you need, you can spend and receive bitcoin while leaving the majority of your savings in a secure cold storage setup, such as multisig, that eliminates single points of failure.
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Consider your destination and travel plans when evaluating the risks of traveling with your bitcoin keys. What is the relative crime risk at your destination? Is your destination a high-crime nation or city? What will your surroundings be like?
Minimizing potential bitcoin losses by only keeping small amounts in mobile wallets is one consideration, but even storing keys to multisig wallets on your smartphone when traveling can increase the chances of compromise, necessitating an arduous key replacement.
You should always secure your seed phrases, but they are the unencrypted secret for a given key, making them much easier to compromise than a hardware wallet. Seed phrase backups are easier to physically steal, copy, or photograph
For most normal travel, you should leave your seed phrase backups in a secure storage location and travel with one or more hardware wallets. Your hardware wallet’s private key data is generally secured within a secure element, behind a PIN, and requires a PC to access.
Before an attacker can attack, they need to know who they’re going after. This is where operational security comes in. The following applies to saving wealth with bitcoin in general, but it’s especially applicable while traveling. On the go, you’re often at the whims of people and environments you can’t control.
Four primary tips on this subject: 1. Don’t talk about bitcoin with people you don’t trust 2. Don’t put bitcoin stickers on your laptop or devices 3. Don’t wear bitcoin-related merchandise 4. Don’t talk about how much bitcoin you own
Whether you’re traveling with a hardware wallet or software wallet, many wallets allow you to make a decoy wallet. Decoy wallets allow you to create a second wallet, entirely separate from your primary one, that you can activate in duress scenarios.
There are a few different ways to set up a decoy bitcoin wallet: 1. Singlesig + passphrase 2. Use one key in a multisig quorum 3. Duress PIN Use bitcoin funds you’re willing to lose but will make the attacker think they got what they wanted.
Bitcoin’s native multisig feature can help create decoy wallets, but it’s also a powerful tool for mitigating travel risk generally. Perhaps you need to travel with private keys, but want to avoid the single point of failure of singlesig wallets.
There are many unique capabilities that multisig opens for you if you’re traveling. You could distribute keys while traveling, digitally store a seed phrase (temporarily), mail yourself a key or seed phrase, or take advantage of custody partner countersigns.
It’s a good idea for anyone with substantive bitcoin wealth to have an inheritance plan, but that’s especially the case when traveling. If something were to happen to you while traveling, you want peace of mind knowing that your bitcoin will be rightfully passed to your next of kin without a hitch.
Multisig—and even better for inheritance purposes, including a collaborative custody partner in your multisig setup—can give you the best of all worlds: convenient access to your self-custody bitcoin and peace of mind knowing it will be taken care of in your absence.
This article is provided for educational purposes only, and cannot be relied upon as tax or investment advice. Unchained makes no representations regarding the tax consequences or investment suitability of any structure described herein, and all such questions should be directed to a tax or financial advisor of your choice.