as far as I know Mullvad accepted BCH way back when I first checked them out (5-6 years ago?) + never had LN support, there was/is a 3rd party tool for topping up with Lightning.

Prospective customers in/from India request an end point in India, which is not possible due to data retention laws: https://www.wired.com/story/vpn-firms-flee-india-data-collection-law/

Great writeup, thanks for the input!

hi Matt!

this is a good suggestion, and we have thought about this. mainly off the back of podcast 2.0 personal experiences + L402 experiments. the reason we did not pursue this is the main use case for our user base is "always on VPN" to counter mass surveillance primarily by ISP's. we could not forecast real demand for this and making it happen was not a straightforward exercise. I still think it's a novel/useful approach though, will reach out when we discuss it again internally.

half-related question - what's your use case for a VPN browser extension [besides this idea]? it's been in our backlog for some time but could not find compelling reasons to build it. "can't install software on my work laptop" and "i need ad hoc tunnels for a short browsing session and won't bother tunnelling all my traffic through the vpn" were the primary ones.

good luck with PPQ will look into it.

yeah this is an excellent suggestions - we did look into it and had a proof of concept project on this. we concluded to fully implement would take a big chunk of work and the adoption rate + actual benefits vs. current flow from privacy gains perspective would be likely too low. this was some time ago so it might be time to dig up those notes.

thanks, I agree this would be a better user experience overall.

this is a good note. advice to Trezor folks reading this:

might get tired of this at some point (SN or me), but I'll keep doing it until I see this link pop up..

please be advised the privacytools.io site used to be high quality, independent and ad-free privacy related portal, but recently it become a one-man team focused on monetizing$$ its earlier credibility instead of giving reliable advice. many recent recommendations are untrustworthy, or harmful.

please use/recommend privacyguides.org instead (run by old privacytools team)

please be advised the privacytools.io site used to be high quality, independent and ad-free, BUT the team has moved on to start a new project privacyguides.org (mentioned by @Michelson_Morley), and privacytools is now a one-man team focused on monetizing$$ its earlier credibility instead of giving reliable advice.

Have a kid and tell everyone you'll only share pics of the baby via Signal. I've onboarded and actively communicate with 15+ people exclusively on Signal after using this..."technique".

Cons: takes time, effort, resources, upends your life. So it's kind of an overkill for Signal adoption reasons only.

Thanks. Mexico is coming soon.

The issue with more obscure countries is:

Why big VPN providers can offer end points in many such countries? Because they don't rely on bare metal servers, but use VPS/shared hosting, which is cheaper, easier to replace and more expendable. We don't go down that route as it carries privacy and security risks.

Thanks! We have exit locations in 35 countries. Do you have a specific one in mind which is missing from the list?

Thanks for the nice words. We've been using BTCPay for a long time, one of our favorite projects in the space:) - https://foundation.btcpayserver.org/

Thanks! While the idea has merit due to the benefit of looking like a residential IP which would solve a lot of VPN use issues, it could face reliability/speed and also privacy/trust issues. If a customer exits on your egress their potentially isolated, unencrypted traffic is liable to inspection by an entity they don't know and cannot vet - of course you won't learn their source IPs if they enter at an IVPN server, but it still introduces uncertainty. I think the risk-reward tradeoff is not good for privacy conscious users, while others might not be able to assess it properly.

Hello Tony! Yes we have considered it and done some research towards this. I can share more, email me (in bio) and let me know about your preferred channel to discuss further.

For those who never heard about IVPN - we've been around since 2010, we are privacy activists and Bitcoiners.

IVPN Light is an experiment in supporting Lightning adoption. It is admittedly not a novel concept, but it offers a unique combination of the following:

We look forward to your feedback and appreciate any ideas for improvement here or other channels: https://github.com/ivpn/ivpn.net https://www.ivpn.net/contactus/

We also have a "regular" VPN service supported by open-source apps: https://www.ivpn.net/

If you want to dig into our background and philosophy, I suggest starting here: https://tftc.io/tftc-podcast/392-resisting-online-surveillance-with/ https://www.ivpn.net/ethics/

Glad to see multiple mentions of privacy/surveillance issues.

Surveillance is now the norm online and increasingly in the 'meatspace'. In the US is is the foundation of the business model of the biggest tech companies, which impacts virtually every one of us - combined with ISP level, financial, medical, facial recognition and other types of privacy violations there is little chance you are not affected by this problem. This is not just enabled, but encouraged by 'national security' hawk lawmakers and government agencies, who benefit from the new status quo by getting around constitutional limitations.

Privacy is power, and especially on a massive scale, surveillance is a way to grasp that power and take control over you, and the society you live in. China is leading the way in political and social justification, implementation and technological progress around surveillance, exporting their models and tech to dozens of countries in the world right now. With a potential shift of leading power status this has serious implications for the next decade - governments that start to align more with China/BRICS will fall in line, benefit from cheap technology and know-how, and use increasingly sophisticated surveillance capabilities for obtaining or staying in power.

if you want to dig in more this is a good seminal book on the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Good_Place_(book)

preparing to present and post about our new "get a vpn tunnel in 60 seconds - priced in sats, paid with lightning" project - https://www.ivpn.net/light if stackers have any tips of where we can put in front of LN users you know what to do ˇˇˇˇˇ