Elwar
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September 24, 2017, 05:27:32 AM

The main thing that I worried about Trezor or Ledger Nano S is that custom officials around the world are going to wise up and start looking for them.  Because they do have rather distinct look from your regular USBs.  

Pretty much every countries in the world has currency amount restriction and reporting requirement at airport.  If countries start to include Bitcoin into amount that you have to declare, having even 1 BTC in your hardware wallet could easily exceed those limit one day!  Since most limit are around USD or EUR 10K max.  BTC could easily reach USD or EUR 10K if it wants to.  

I travel a lot and move to different countries at times with all of my belongings (a carry-on and backpack).

I chose to use cryptosteel as my cold storage. I have several of them to split my coins up. Before moving to a new country the last time I went country hopping for a vacation before going to my new job. There was no way I was going to check in my cryptosteel and I was worried about anyone tampering with my cryptosteel so I wrapped them all into one block with a metallic tape.

Of course this set off the security scan as I went through Dubai. I spent about 10 minutes with the security guard trying to show him that they were harmless plates of metal (finally unwrapping one of them). It didn't help that I have a full chemical suit with gas mask but that's another story.

When I passed through Vietnam I made sure to have a picture of the cryptosteel on my phone and told the guy it was for my bitcoins. He just said "oh, bitcoins! cool" and let me go. I checked my bag when I passed through Thailand and was paranoid the whole time. I have a backup (somewhere in the world) and I have manipulated the private keys in such a way that even if someone was looking at them they would not have my private keys. But I still did not want to lose it. Relying on my backups would mean a lot of flights long flights.