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Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

mullvad.net

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Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#81

Post by 0des »

vmception wrote: post #22
0des wrote: post #14

Its too bad monero research lab seems to be slowing down and disbanding. Devs have to eat and all, but I wonder sometimes if a longer and slower emission curve would have helped here. Monero is mostly emitted at this point. For a project that means so much to the world and still has much work to do, its a shame how things turned out with MRL.

Why is that bad? it’s done people deciding if they want excess holdings of Monero shouldnt base their confidence on a standing committee

It is not a standing committee, it was community funded research that produced privacy technology. "It" is never done.

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#82

Post by photon-torpedo »

nuclx wrote: post #72

What are people using VPNs for mostly, if they're living in a country without internet censorship? It's either your ISP or the VPN provider, which can log the websites you have visited, so there isn't a clear advantage of using a VPN. Sure the VPN provider may claim to log nothing, but that's hard to confirm and not proven to be true in some cases (related thread regarding Protonmail: https://news.ycombinator.com/ite…

> What are people using VPNs for mostly, if they're living in a country without internet censorship?

Current example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31248250

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#83

Post by vmception »

0des wrote: post #81
vmception wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that bad? it’s done people deciding if they want excess holdings of Monero shouldnt base their confidence on a standing committee

It is not a standing committee, it was community funded research that produced privacy technology. "It" is never done.

Tornado cash is good enough tbh

Monero communities arrogance and in-grouping has segregated them just like they desired. That technology and user experience is an evolutionary dead end, it can exist and that has enough utility. But in the multichain world the user experience is better and the funding models are better, even gitcoin grants streamline development of projects.

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#84

Post by modeless »

nuclx wrote: post #72

What are people using VPNs for mostly, if they're living in a country without internet censorship? It's either your ISP or the VPN provider, which can log the websites you have visited, so there isn't a clear advantage of using a VPN. Sure the VPN provider may claim to log nothing, but that's hard to confirm and not proven to be true in some cases (related thread regarding Protonmail: https://news.ycombinator.com/ite…

I don't have a choice of ISPs. It's not a competitive market and they have no incentive to respect my privacy in the slightest.

In contrast I can choose any VPN provider in the world. It's a competitive market and they have strong incentives to respect privacy because it's one of their main selling points. Any VPN that is discovered to not be respecting privacy will lose a lot of business in short order.

Sure you can say that they can violate privacy in secret, but that's a big risk for them. It's no risk at all for an ISP because their customers have no choice. It's no guarantee, but it's definitely a better situation to use a company that actually has incentives aligned with yours.

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#85

Post by 0des »

vmception wrote: post #83
0des wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not a standing committee, it was community funded research that produced privacy technology. "It" is never done.

Tornado cash is good enough tbh Monero communities arrogance and in-grouping has segregated them just like they desired. That technology and user experience is an evolutionary dead end, it can exist and that has enough utility. But in the multichain world the user experience is better and the funding models are better, even gitcoin grants streamline development of projects.

Respectfully I disagree with this statement, on a conceptual, as well as factual level.

>Tornado cash is good enough tbh

I hold neither of these, but as someone with a significant amount of experience in the field, the facts are clear. "Good enough" is not an objective measurement of the binary quality of fungibility. Monero is fungible.

Is this me saying everyone should go out and buy some Monero, no, it is me saying that when you consider the mechanics of the way these two scantly comparable technologies function, there is one clear winner because only one is fungible.

I don't have a response to the social issues of those that use or perpetuate Monero adoption, just as I don't have a response to the social issues of those that use or perpetuate USD, or any other asset. It's not my business what other people do, and I don't feel associated by virtue of using the same utility.

> That technology [ ... ] is an evolutionary dead end

This will need a source.

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#86

Post by ravenstine »

Liquid_Fire wrote: post #45
ravenstine wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ProtonVPN because I already have a Protonmail account and they don't sponsor podcasts (as far as I know).

I'm also not sure why sponsoring podcasts is relevant, but FWIW I have heard ads for ProtonVPN on the Darknet Diaries podcast ( https://darknetdiaries.com/sponsors/ ).

It affects my decision making because the stuff that gets plastered across podcasts and YouTube videos is often crap the hosts themselves clearly haven't even used. Just my opinion based on the times I've actually researched the products I've seen sponsoring content. YMMV

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#87

Post by shiftpgdn »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #69
tomxor wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like mullvad's service too (wiregaurd)... My only issue is that is seems to have become increasingly difficult to access many websites through their servers. I suppose this is inevitable to some degree with any VPN service, it's part of the deal for more privacy, you have to share an IP with potential sources of abuse. But it seems to have gotten really bad recently to the point that I end up server hoping t…

> My only issue is that is seems to have become increasingly difficult to access many websites through their servers. Welcome to the world of Tor users. People who value online dignity need to work together against privacy hostile web technologies. My present bugbear is Cloudflare, who seem to do a lot to disrupt privacy respecting technologies. Ultimately though, the power lies with web service designers. One can no…

The flip side to this is to have your site hammered by bots, scrapers and worms looking for exploits (look at your weblogs sometime and see how often Wordpress php pages are requested, lol). I don’t know what the middle ground is but in spirit I agree with you, especially in keeping the internet decentralized. In practice I’m not so sure.

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#88

Post by selsta »

0des wrote: post #14

Its too bad monero research lab seems to be slowing down and disbanding. Devs have to eat and all, but I wonder sometimes if a longer and slower emission curve would have helped here. Monero is mostly emitted at this point. For a project that means so much to the world and still has much work to do, its a shame how things turned out with MRL.

monero, without dev tax and pre-mine, simply doesn't have the funds to compete in research with other, more well funded projects. I don't see how a different emission curve would have helped here.

MRL work is progressing on Seraphis[1] which will allow for significantly higher ring sizes without increasing the transaction size. A proof of concept is currently in development.

[1] https://www.getmonero.org/2021/12/22/what-is-seraphis.html

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#89

Post by f38zf5vdt »

nuclx wrote: post #72

What are people using VPNs for mostly, if they're living in a country without internet censorship? It's either your ISP or the VPN provider, which can log the websites you have visited, so there isn't a clear advantage of using a VPN. Sure the VPN provider may claim to log nothing, but that's hard to confirm and not proven to be true in some cases (related thread regarding Protonmail: https://news.ycombinator.com/ite…

> may be blocked from less websites than TOR exit nodes I guess.

Try routing all your traffic through TOR and trying to navigate the modern web or common apps. It is _extremely_ punishing when you connect through TOR exit nodes.

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#90

Post by Kiro »

_8j50 wrote: post #19

I gotta say, I love Monero but every single time I see malware deploy a miner it is Monero for obvious reasons. More than any currency I want it to succeed because of true anonymity it provides but when you accept Monero, better beef up your anti-abuse capacity.

> for obvious reasons

You might think it's because it's private and confidential but it's actually because it's suited for CPU mining.

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