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Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

mullvad.net

211–220 of 246 posts

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#211
post #90
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.

No post body was provided.

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea problem from an admin perspective is that all malicious traffic attempts to use privacy respecting technology. It’s more guilt by association than anything else for the legitimate users. One of the weird realities is that in order to combat fraud you need to be able to identify the source, which is a hard reality as a privacy advocate.

True, but as far as cloudflare goes - it doesn't explain why plain, probably cached, GET requests have to be behind a captcha. If that's really an issue, can't they save it for POST requests and other non-static endpoints.

>probably cached, GET requests

HTML isn't cached by default with cloudflare

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#213
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DNS queries are still leaked (from most users) regardless of end-to-end TLS. There is of course DNSSEC and DNS over HTTPS, but those are not used by the majority. Another use case you missed is downloading/uploading pirated/copywrited content. Good VPNs receive DMCA notices and throw them in the garbage. You are right that VPNs are not useful for many use cases and they can give users a false sense of security.

DNSSEC doesn't help privacy, it helps security.

You mean it helps record integrity. The "security" story with DNSSEC is much more of a mixed bag than that; there's a reason it's very rarely deployed in the industry.

You're definitely right to point out that DoH helps with the VPN DNS privacy problem and DNSSEC doesn't.

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monero users are more likely to be the type to use a cold wallet, and a ban on cold wallets is unenforceable (especially for Monero, where transactions can't be traced) as it's kind of like holding cash, except that there isn't anything to be found physically.

The hard part is getting the monero in the first place to put in your cold wallet. The main two options are (1) use an exchange, all of which are either being monitors or blacklisted by india (2) exchange cash in person, good luck doing that in a country that is actively suppressing it

I thought it doesn't matter if it is known you bought Moreno. When you spend it, that spend can't be traced back to you? Wasn't that the whole point of Moreno?

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it, websites like that are saying they’ll only do it without a condom. You want it real bad, so it’s tempting to try to bargain about it, or maybe just take it off for now - it’s just a little while, what’re the chances it goes wrong? - but we all know that the smart move is to keep it on or back out entirely. Reasonable partners, of which there are many, understand and cooperate. And ones that don’t ar…

Username checks out.

Please don't do this here.

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#217
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.

More people need to put up bounties for feature development. There are some existing sites but they’re not heavily used. I think plenty of people would be happy to develop a feature for 5/6 figures. There are also some monero whales that could probably stand to contribute to further development even if they don’t do it themselves (like fluffy pony) but unfortunately it looks like they are/he is in the early stages of…

Where can one read more about this last bit?

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hard part is getting the monero in the first place to put in your cold wallet. The main two options are (1) use an exchange, all of which are either being monitors or blacklisted by india (2) exchange cash in person, good luck doing that in a country that is actively suppressing it

I thought it doesn't matter if it is known you bought Moreno. When you spend it, that spend can't be traced back to you? Wasn't that the whole point of Moreno?

But if India makes it illegal to obtain monero, then you won't get to that second step of getting to use it. Controlling the on-ramps seems to be the easiest way to regulate crypto, as we saw when Canada started cracking down back in February

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#219
post #2

I’m curious as to what HN’s VPNs of choice are. I personally use IVPN and Mullvad.

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

> and they don't sponsor podcasts

I do this as well! Annoy me with to much ads and I'll avoid you and your product out of spite.

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#220
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the compliment! We are indeed for real, but I don't expect this comment will convince you. I'd love to know what we could do that would change your mind. The same goes for anyone else reading this. Are you worried that we are too good to be true? What could we do to become more trustworthy in your eyes? Cheers, Fredrik Stromberg (cofounder of Mullvad)

This isn't meant to be criticism just curious. Why did it take so long to add monero support? For the past several years there's only ~2 other VPNs that tick all the privacy boxes, and you're the most preferable - other then lack of monero support. It always seemed weird that you went so far for privacy, but didn't support monero. Was it just on the backlog and took a bit of time to implement? I appreciate that you b…

> Why did it take so long to add monero support?

Some third-parties did sell gift-codes using Monero before Mullvad had native support although I had no experience with them.

> I've heard a rumor that you've shared a user IP because of a government subpoena (live during a connection, so it wasn't logged).

Got any details?

FWIW: Correlating the origin IP with real-time traffic out of a single-hop VPN tunnel can be done using traffic-analysis by third-parties that are not the VPN provider themselves.

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