Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
There is zero privacy using a VPN when they have all your details on file from a credit card transaction. Cryptocurrency is the only private form of payment online period.
These guys are total hypocrites, they will likely be selling your online activity to anyone willing to pay so they stopped accepting crypto because if you pay with crypto they cannot profit from your data easily.
Here is their chatroom if you want to stop by and let them know what you think about this
There is near-zero privacy when a VPN has your real IP address and could log connections (source/dest/proto/port). Don't fool yourself into thinking that using crypto payments adds much, unless you are constructing your own VPN onion OR you are concerned about what shows up on your CC bill directly (eg. to hide it from your family)
When you use a VPN provider, you are trusting them with your anonymity - that they don't keep logs of connections that could lead back to your identity, and/or they won't hand that info over to others (law enforcement, courts, some spook slipping an employee $500).
It's also quite likely that your the average VPN user uses the same webbrowser (full of fingerprints and tasty cookies) to identify themselves in 10 different ways as they visit their shady torrent/porn/zuckerberg/fetish/gambling/bezos site, removing another layer of the obscurity onion.
When you pay with crypto you have plausible deniability. Your IP is not you and you can just say someone visiting was using your connection.
It would cost thousands of dollars, if at all possible, for someone to prove you are the actual person behind an IP, if you pay with legacy payment systmes you are legally confirming that it is you.
Thus for marketing purposes your IP is totally useless. So it remains a fact that paying for VPN with crypto is the only way to go.
It is best to use crypto everywhere possible anyway as the legacy financial scam system crumbles.
In many countries the onus is on the connection owner to point the finger at the next person, or to otherwise prove it wasn't them / their responsibility. Even if they can, fighting off lawyers who are experts in this area is costly (time & typically money).
Exactly the same problem exists with a VPN. What makes it personal? It's just a service you bought, which can be used by multiple people and devices. The source IP typically links it to the user. So .. back to the point of picking a trusted VPN provider in a trusted region.
For civil matters (like copyright infringement in most jurisdictions), a standard VPN (with egress in another jurisdiction) and client-side precautions will be fine, crypto or no crypto. Frankly, it's quite normal for people to use VPNs these days. My employer even recommends employees use personal VPNs for their personal devices.
For the despicable shit, espionage etc., onion routing and crypto might be better. The police and agencies have many more tools at their disposal, and any mistake could be one's undoing.
A firm dropping crypto is hardly a reason to declare a holy war against a VPN provider. For those who care, they already do.
Thanks for the reasonable and level headed reply. Sick of hearing "they are already tracking every thing" from numbskull TV watchers.
Still the point remains, if you are advertising yourself as a pro privacy service and not accepting crypto you are suspect and should be avoided. All points considered crypto is still the most private way to pay.
If anything they should be dropping credit cards due to privacy concerns.
Your IP is not you and you can just say someone visiting was using your connection.
Brother, they'll take your router and dig though the logs. And if you clear them, it will look like you are trying to hide something so they'll have reason to dig deeper, so they'll ask your ISP, (your VPN which hopefully doesn't log) and various website operators for all their logs. You won't believe how much fingerprinting there is and how easy it is to figure out which device was doing what in your home. And if all the traffic is via VPN, you have no plausible deniability.
No one is going to go through all that effort to make sure it is me doing the browsing for marketing purposes. You are talking about thousands of hours of work.
I am not talking about doing anything criminal. I am talking about using an easy anonymous form of payment to thwart the vast majority of general spying.
The point being is if your VPN refuses to accept crypto it is most likely because they are selling your data and they cannot sell it for any good price if they do not know who you are explicitly.
You are talking about plausible deniability, so I assumed this is in relation to law enforcement.
You are talking about thousands of hours of work.
It's 10-20 manhours and most of it is letting an expert read the logs. I worked on the ISP side of such cases, it took us 1 minute to provide such data.
I was speaking of plausible deniability on the social level not from a criminal perspective.
A VPN would stop them in their tracks because there would be no logs to read except you connecting to the VPN on the ISP side.
You can also use a VPN -> Tor -> VPN in which case it is almost impossible to trace anything unless you examine the whole internet connection map which is thousands of hours of effort.
I was a user for a while. Never did figure out if they were just a small team of well-meaning people who didn't know how to run a business properly, or a front for something. Good prices though, and reliable service for the time I was there. Their web page seems to indicate they got acquired by Malwarebytes, I'm not sure if that makes them less trustworthy, or more.
Thanks for the info, this likely explains why they dropped private payments. Large corporations hate privacy for their customers but love it for themselves.