A Test on Self Custody

[Ambatman]

Like I stated on BTT
This is not an original post by me. I came across it on twitter and felt it would be great to share so those interested can give it a try.

The fire incident on LA showed the importance on how seedphrase are kept.
A Tweet was made there that I also liked

A seed phrase doesn’t belong in a safe.

Putting it in a safe implies it has value to be investigated.
Source

I believe it's in alignment with the notion that a Person wearing a mask in a bank would be more suspicious than one dressing normal despite protecting identity.

Enough of my Rambling. These below are the test and the source would be placed at the bottom.

1. Tell your next of kin to retrieve your coins as if you had died. They are only allowed to use the info they have now. No new note or instructions allowed- if you died today they wouldn’t have those instructions either. See how the test works.

2: Put your phone down and pretend that it, your PC and every single thing in your home / office is destroyed.  Now retrieve your coins. Remember - no use of your phone or anything from your home - no paper, notes, nothing.

3. Stop what you are doing & assume 2 or more armed attackers are now at your main premises. Assume they have disabled means for help & assume they will find a safe if you have one. If they threaten violence against you how exactly do you deal with this? What can they get?

4. Assume that over a period of 3 weeks you suffer from illness, amnesia, dementia or extreme trauma which causes you to forget everything about your current setup.  How do you or your loved ones / living assistants rebuild and understand your storage system?

5. You speak “misinformation”, are a political enemy or are accused of a crime.  The government gets a search warrant for your office, home, bank & safe deposit box. Assume they will find any 12 or 24 word pass phrase or private key on the premises. Can an agent sweep it?

6. There is extreme political turmoil in your country and you have 24 hours to pack your bags & move to another country. Assume banks/ safe deposit locations are closed. You won’t be able to return to your country. Can you bring your coins and access them in a new country? Source.

Other ideas could be added since I'm well aware the OP isn't all knowing.

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[TomPluz]

A seed phrase doesn’t belong in a safe. Putting it in a safe implies it has value to be investigated.

This is just like putting all of your money in a physical wallet and when you lost it people who found it would naturally be inclined to look what can be inside. Now, I read the whole post and there is no good suggestion on where to put a copy of our seed phrases (am assuming it is plural because most of us have many wallets except maybe those using hardware wallets). The problem with seed phrases is that for an ordinary guy who has no photographic memory it would be so difficult to memorize them much more so if there are more than one wallet. So one may really have to hide it somewhere and that can be subject to being discovered by someone else, be stolen or just be gone for unknown or known reasons. As for me actually I don't see any problem as I don't actually have a big crypto holdings.

[bitterguy28]

Now, I read the whole post and there is no good suggestion on where to put a copy of our seed phrases (am assuming it is plural because most of us have many wallets except maybe those using hardware wallets).

op seems to just have shared possible but hypothetical scenarios where our seed phrase will be in danger when you read the whole post it seems like there’s no best way to store our seed phrase because everywhere is unsafe but i think the best we can do really is to store it in a physical storage space secure enough

i don’t want to treat it as if it’s not important just to redirect people with ill intentions before they even get to where i store my seed phrase they are going to have to go to identify me and find the exact location of my physical storage to me i deem that safe enough

as per sharing it to my loved ones, i can always leave instructions that isn’t so straightforward that they can get to my seedphrase immediately but easy enough to understand if i were dying

[joniboini]

Some of the questions are good, but for someone new to this they'll probably get confused IMO. For example, let's say they answered that an agent might be able to find their backup because they don't encrypt it. What should they do then? Should they add encryption, how much entropy is required before it is considered safe, and how can they recover it easily even if they suffer from dementia? I think it will help if you add some details for hypothetical answers so people can figure out whether they need to improve or if the setup is overkill for the average joe.