2026-04-23
Transferring cryptocurrency across cities is a pain in the ass
Disclaimer
The problem
- I am sharing a pain point I have personal experience with.
- In theory, here's how you might do it:
- Suppose you start with cryptocurrency in cold wallet in city A.
- Move the funds from your cold wallet into a brain wallet (memorise the passphrase) or paper wallet (write down the passphrase on a piece of paper).
- Actually physically travel from city A to city B, carrying this with you. Hope you don't forget the password yourself (12 word passphrases are hard to memorise). Or, hope you don't lose the piece of paper it is written on, and hope it isn't stolen, and hope airport/border security doesn't find it and ask questions.
- Once in city B, set up a cold wallet in city B. Transfer funds from the brain wallet or paper wallet to the cold wallet.
- In practice, here is what is more safe (because paper wallets and brain wallets carry risks):
- Suppose you start with cryptocurrency in cold wallet in city A.
- Travel to city B.
- Setup a cold wallet in city B.
- Write down the address to your cold wallet in city B on a piece of paper, or in some encrypted anonymous cloud server (like protonmail or privex or similar).
- Travel back to city A, carrying this address.
- Transfer the funds to city B.
- Travel to city B, and confirm you've received the funds.
- If you want to be even safer, you want to test run with a small amount first (because transferring large sums all at once is risky). At this point the procedure actually becomes ridiculous.
- Start from city A.
- Travel to city B.
- Setup cold wallet in city B.
- Travel back to city A carrying the address of the wallet in city B.
- Send test amount to wallet in city B.
- Travel to city B.
- Confirm you have transferred the test amount.
- Travel to city A.
- Send the full amount to wallet in city B.
- Travel to city B.
- Confirm you have transferred the full amount.
- Travel to wherever you actually needed to go for whatever work you needed to do.
- All this also becomes much harder if there are, say, visa issues, and it is not clear if your future travels will even be allowed or not.
Solutions?
- Having a second person in the loop ofcourse makes it easier. But then, that is a separate problem. Send money from Alice in city A to Bob in city B is very easy. Send money from Alice in city A to Alice in city B is what is hard, assuming you don't have a trustworthy Bob in city B who can hold all your funds for you.
- Maybe there is a way to solve this using multisigs? You could operate a 2-of-3 multisig with one key in your brain, one key in cold wallet in city A and one key in cold wallet in city B. Someone else will have to work out the details of using this setup. Social recovery wallets and multisigs in general are a big mess and come with their own complications, so I tend to avoid them in general.
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