To be clear there will be a paper as well. But let's say the gov raids your house and takes your paper with 24 words, that's it....bye-bye. But if they raided your house and took the 12 word seed, you can still have this in your head with a passphrase.
In my opinion the only way to be secure from seizure of your funds is to memorize the seed. With 12 words it's much easier. This is why I need to generate the 12 words.
Thats a horrible idea.
Even if you are going to memorize the 12 words, without a proper backup this is just careless.
There are a lot of things which can happen which lead to a loss of your memory (e.g. car accident, alzheimer, trauma, shock moment, ...).
Your whole cryptos would be gone in this case. A proper backup (better: 2 or 3) is a must have.
I am sure someone can help with this. Explain it to me, I understand I may need to purchase an offline laptop which is ok.
There are a lot of ways to generate a
random number. In the end thats all you need.
The easiest (and one of the safest) way would probably be to boot a linux distro (offline) and do some stuff (so the internal entropy pool gets filled), then get a 256 bit number from
dev/urandom (don't use
dev/random!) and convert it manually to a 12 word seed (with the BIP39 word list). You will need to calculate the last bits of the last word (since they are basically a checksum).
For more information take a look at
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki and
https://github.com/trezor/python-mnemonic.