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Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

It’s the easiest and 2nd most secure way to pay for Mullvad VPN (also used as the backend of the Mozilla VPN). The only other alternative that leaves them with nothing to log is sending cash in an envelope.

Donations to people where paypal doesn’t work are also easier.

Those are the only uses cases (for me) I encountered and used though ;)

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Your VPN provider has access to your public IP already. If they were highjacked by a malicious state actor, that would be all they required anyway.

Therefore, you already have to trust them, in which case you might as well just wire the money the old-fashioned way.

Can't get a log that has been wiped. But yes, Mullvad are only as good as their word. The other more expensive and complicated alternative would be to host your own vpn server, which still has the server provider as the trust anchor.

Tor is the only network sufficient enough to thwart malicious state actor's efforts.

> Tor is the only network sufficient enough to thwart malicious state actor's efforts.

It comes closest at least. I’m not sure if it’s more than rumors, but they are persistent that NSA and similar actors can de-anonymyze tor users.

Luckily state actors do not play into any of my threat models.

Rumor no more [0] No sane person should want the state marking them an enemy. Playing that game quickly becomes a contest of who'll be the first to blink. And you will in the end, blink.

[0] https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/06/12/facebook-paid-fo...

It seems fairly obvious once you trace the funding on a lot of nodes. Plus that court case that got dropped with the child porn guy - they dropped it because they refused to show how they found him. 0day most likely.

If you pay in other ways, there are certain logs that they are required to keep.

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