Deniability - Where to hide your Monero Wealth ? : OpSec | Torhoo darknet markets

Let's take a look. I hope you consider this feedback.
(Pt 1 of response, see Pt 2 in reply)

Where to hide your Monero Wealth ?

Have you ever asked yourself what you would do if you were to recieve 9000 moneros (which is worth approx 1.6M euros currently) to your wallet right now ? Do you know where could you even store it safely in the long run? We're going to explore exactly that in this tutorial.


Legal Disclaimer: as usual, i don't actually recommend you do anything illegal, this is strictly educational as detailed here.

Sidenote: Help us improve this tutorial by letting us know if there's anything missing or incorrect on this git issue directly!

Small nitpick. XMR should be used for plural "Moneros" as to keep with conventions.

Why is this important ?


First of all, you cannot appear to be rich without being able to justify where the money comes from:

So if you can't officially spend that unofficial money, where do you even store it then ?

Statist thieves are everywhere. They are integral parts of governments, and their belief in the State dictates that the rich needs to serve the government one way or the other, So if you are getting rich without giving back to the state, to them you are stealing from the state, which means that you are going into sensitive use territory, so if you are recieving money income that you can't officially justify, you need to tread this path extra-carefully. You need to make sure that you keep the access to your money, while at the same time make it impossible for thieves to seize it.

In most modern societies nowadays you have a legal maximum amount of cash one is allowed to carry on oneself. If you are found to be in possession of one extra dollar above that maximum legal amount you are allowed to carry, the state can legally steal it from you.


When flying within the United States, there is no legal limit on the amount of carrying Cash or monetary instruments you can carry. However, if you are traveling internationally to or from the U.S., you must declare amounts exceeding $10,000 USD to the customs authorities.

Of course, given the context, carrying entire barrels of cash with you while going anywhere is incredibly stupid, because if it gets found at the airport, at home, in the desert, it will get seized no matter what. Monero by itself solves that problem partially, who's going to guess that a usb key can contain a monero wallet seed phrase worth 1.6M euros ? If storing your entire wealth on a usb stick sounds safe to you, you need to understand how badly this can end like in this case:

Thing is, we are aiming for deniability here. You need to be able to deny having that amount of monero in your posession. Because if you can't deny having it in your possession, you're going to get it stolen from you by the state, all because the setup you have is not suitable for sensitive use.

If the adversary suspects that you are recieving monero one way or the other, they're going to look at every harddrive, every usb key of yours, and if there are any encrypted volumes found you'll be forced to type a password to unlock them. That's why you need to prepare for the worst, if you are going to actually recieve alot of money on a monero wallet.

In short, if you store your monero wallet seed phrase outside of a veracrypt hidden volume (meaning outside of deniable encryption), IT CAN BE SEIZED!

Could be more on topic here. But the information on carry amounts is good
for background and trivia. Being forced to unlock a device will depend on the region, but it always a good assumption to make.
The United States has its fifth amendment which is sufficient against soft
agencies. In other places or depending on the adversary encountered, you may be imprisoned for the existence of an encrypted volume, and/or the enhanced techniques will be used to extract the necessary intelligence pertaining to the volume from the subject. The adversary does not only look at hard drives and USB keys.
They will seize absolutely every and all storage mediums during the
federal law enforcement raid. This includes spare floppy drives and DVDs. They will also have people look through your bookshelves and drawers for paper books and note books and skim through them as well. I cannot speak for every country and their practices, some are more thorough than others.

Where to store the seed phrases?


Your monero seed phrase is what you need to be able to access your wallet, it is a string of 25 words. If you loose it, you loose access to your monero wallet. If someone else gets access to it, they can drain your wallet, that's why you should never keep your monero on centralised exchanges, because the exchange admins hold the keys to your crypto, so they can drain it. ALWAYS SELF-CUSTODY YOUR OWN CRYPTO! if it's not your keys, then it's not your crypto!


yellow exhibit skill bracket venture tail snack deny push direct kitten canyon pulse fiscal ladder release door guitar mix addict crucial aspect wreck salmon velvet

If this is the seed node to your wallet, you absolutely need to keep access to it if you want to be able to keep accessing it, while at the same time make it impossible for others to seize it. Now you can try to remember it by heart, but good luck at that, because i certainly can't.

Realisticly, to securely store our monero seed node, we're going to store it inside of a Keepass KDBX file, which makes it accessible to us by simply remembering the master password of that passwords KDBX file.

Now the question is, where do we store that keepass Passwords.kdbx file ? And how many monero wallets do we need ?

Minor nitpick, lose instead of loose. It is a seed phrase, not a seed node.
While I am correcting these minor typos, I would like to say that I do not
want you to resort to using an LLM to "improve" the writing of the guides.
That would turn the guides into AI slop writing as opposed to this natural writing and is much less desirable. No other issues.

Deniability Context

First of all, you need to remain aware of where your deniability starts and where it ends:

Following our general recommendations on VM-based internet use segmentation, we have our usual Public, Private, Anonymous and Sensitive use VMs.

Public use VM: you cannot deny the existance of a monero wallet in it

Private use VM: you cannot deny the existance of a monero wallet in it

Anonymous use VM: you cannot deny the existance of a monero wallet in it

Sensitive use VM: ONLY HERE You can deny the existance of a monero wallet!

As we have explained previously, you may use Haveno to anonymously trade Peer to Peer direct Monero for fiat and Fiat for Monero. On the surface it looks private, because you are conducting the monero transaction from your (anonymous use) whonix VM:

But the other factor to consider here is that you may not be able to deny that the Haveno Fiat -> XMR transaction took place in case if you just transacted with a malicious peer (that just snitched that you just traded with them):

If you conduct a trade with a malicious peer that intends to tell big daddy government that you just bought monero, who knows, maybe the government would want to steal that monero from you. I don't think this is a likely scenario, but let's suppose that it actually happens:

You recieve a knock on the door, and the statist law enforcement just seizes your devices and they ask you how much monero you own. You may pretend that you lost it in a boating accident, but if your anonymous VM monero wallet contains more than 10000 Euros-worth of monero, the thieves, upon forcing you to unlock your computer, and your keepass Passwords.kdbx file, are going to simply legally steal it from you.

Therefore, That's why we need to cap the total amount of monero stored in wallets that we carry to the maximum legal amount of cash we are allowed to carry wherever we cannot deny it's existance. We have the sum of the private and anonymous monero wallets that cannot go beyond 10000 euros (legally) because we cannot deny their existance, and meanwhile we can store an indefinite amount of monero on the sensitive monero wallet, that is stored inside the Sensitive use VM.

I do not know why you think this is an unlikely scenario. It has already been done and to a high degree of success. Not specifically targeting Haveno, but acting as a malicious peer for transacting cryptocurrency to fiat and vice versa. Some historical reading material on this subject can be found with the search term "Operation Dark Gold". More recently I have discovered with absolute certainty that there is a current operation using FBI online employees on Telegram offering to provide fiat to cryptocurrency in the mail. Malicious peers and services are an ongoing problem and a real threat. Thankfully some of the federal agencies (or their employees at least) and associated vermin involved in these practices, while displaying okay trade-craft and general employment of various humint tactics during interactions, they fail to prevent certain leakages associated with running their operation)))). But I am getting slightly off-topic.

I would assume no based on how the OS works, but is this guide possible if the HostOS is Qubes?? Or maybe not the guide, but is it possible to "hide the wealth" and such? Not that I have much I bought everything myself but if for some unforseen reason my bag suddenly shoots to the moon it could be interesting...

No need to go into too complicated stuff here. If you face a physical threat, just keep your Moneroj separated from the main machine, on an SD card or a USB hidden with perfect deniability.

I'm with everyone else here this is all overkill. Put your monero on multiple drives backed up on hidden volumes with veracrypt, done.