I’m sharing this one because I’m curious what more knowledgeable people think about this one. Please take a peek at the article before joining the discussion, as my limited quote might have dropped useful information
The VPN industry runs on a promise. Pick almost any provider and the pitch is the same: “we don’t keep logs.” You hand over your entire internet connection and, in return, you get a pinky-promise that nobody is writing anything down.
For a lot of privacy-minded people, that promise stopped being good enough a while ago. A no-logs policy is only as honest as the company making it, and even an honest company can be hacked, subpoenaed, or quietly acquired.
Obscura VPN is trying to answer to that problem. Instead of asking you to trust its word, it splits the job across two independent companies so that neither one can tie your identity to your browsing. The first hop is Obscura’s own servers; the exit hop is run by Mullvad. a respected VPM company out of Sweden. Your traffic is end-to-end encrypted to Mullvad’s keys, so Obscura literally can’t read it, and Mullvad never sees who you are.
The pinky promise to not look at who you are on the tech side is only useful if it’s also accompanied with the promise to not know who you are on the business side ie.: not requiring any kind of payment data.
Crypto? That’s almost worse!
As far as I’m aware, nobody has ever been identified by a Monero transaction or a Bitcoin lightning network transaction without getting verification from the other party, e.g., you send money to a company that retains records and gets subpoenaed. Bitcoin transactions made on the lightning network aren’t even recorded on the blockchain, so it’s completely immune to chain analysis.
Yeah but that still means you have to get into crypto which is a well-known scam (and from what I gather even if there might be “legal” crypto exchanges, that “legal” carries its own implications there).
Crypto is not a scam. Crypto is an unregulated transfer mechanism, which has many scammers. If you’re just buying crypto to fund your vpn, you’re not getting scammed unless the VPN itself is a scam.
Using Monero for payment is fine once you have it set up. You’re just using it for facilitating anonymous payments, not treating it like stock.
That being said, setting up Monero securely is a pain. I’d like to use it at some point in the future but right now I have more pressing projects to work on
There are a TON of scams in crypto, no doubt about that at all. I don’t think Bitcoin is one of them, though. I don’t think Monero is, either, but I don’t think it’ll thrive long term. Most of the rest is bullshit just chasing dollars.