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Comment by mhitza | Hacker News Reader

The post hints at this, but having a shop where one can buy a privacy pass without an account makes sense.

Should support some crypto currency (probably monero), and something like GNU Taler if that technology ever becomes usable.

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Kagi accepts bitcoins but Vlad (the founder) mentioned on their forum that so few people use this option that it does not make sense to work on accepting Monero.

Kagi's privacy guarantee is more of a "trust me bro" and I say that as a Kagi subscriber. While they may claim that they preserve privacy or anonimity as long as it's tied to a user account, or payment information nothing prevents them from associating searches with user. Even protonmail enabled logging for a particular user at one point. Their guarantee is on the same level.

At the same time, privacy pass is a very foreign concept to me. If they are transferable between devices, one could generate a couple and resell them over some other medium (even in person).

We implemented Privacy Pass exactly so that you do not need to trust any claims we make but as a user have a (provable, cryptographically) mechanism that guarantees this, with one click, whenever you need it.

the privacy pass extension is open source exactly because users can then verify the process. and yeah, to prevent reselling they've made it so you can't get infinite tokens.

>as long as it's tied to a user account, or payment information

Privacy Pass unties the searches from the user account and payment information.

(vlad here) Rather, we are opportunistic about it and we want to focus on things that make impact (which most of the time is search, not billing). If there is enough demand, we will work on Monero support - and yes I agree, buying privacy pass tokens, without even needing an account, is one of those super-cool use cases.

I'd love to pay for Kagi with crypto, the main thing for me is the steep transfer fees. Nevertheless those can be offset somewhat with bulk payments. How about ability to buy like 3 years of Kagi at a time with crypto?

When I try to go into billing in Kagi I just get forwarded to Stripe. Does Stripe process the crypto payments?

paying with bitcoin lightning has close to zero transfer fees

edit: on desktop, on the page where you choose your plan, scroll to the bottom and look for the link to paying with OpenNode (btc lightning)

Lightning just isn't a good option as you first have to pay the expensive Bitcoin fees just to be able to use it... (And hope that you'll find a route otherwise you'll have to do it again.)

If $0.27 is an expensive fee then I don't have any answers to that.

Yeah routing can suck. First timers should use a lightning wallet with built in LSP support like ZEUS, BitKit, Phoenix, etc. Then routing is a non-issue.

Bitcoin average transaction fees is rarely under $1: https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

I think it's better to use another cryptocurrency like Monero than having to rely on a centralized service just to get a half-decent user experience.

People regularly overpay, so I'm not sure looking at average fees it the right lens. Monero is great, but it's trivial to get an excellent user experience with lightning nowadays that doesn't require custodians.

The reason people overpay is that it's impossible to foresee what fee will get you into the next block, so they overpay to not get stuck potentially for hours or more.

Not requiring custodians is just one part, having to rely on third-party services for basic functionality is another.

Monero itself has very low fees.

It's almost only Bitcoin that has the absurdly expensive fees.

I know I’m just one guy, but lack of Monero support kept me away.

This feature looks like it narrows the gap a bit though.

Nice work

Don't know a bunch about cryptocurrencies, but couldn't you get the benefits of monero by just converting monero to btc before paying?

Are the conversion fees too high?

You can but its not only more effort and increases the price but also reduces privacy and anonymity because you introduce a possible point of tracking with most likely KYC exchanged BTC and a publicly viewable blockchain.

In addition to what u/akimbostrawman said, I feel like doing that would undermine long-term privacy by slowing adoption of a tool (monero in this case) in favor of something less private.

You can, but to retain anonymity you'll need to go through decentralized exchange (DEX). This is extra hassle, especially if you have never done this before.

Nobody wants to use BTC because of high fees and at this point its less a usable exchange of value than speculative asset. I personally would only ever use and trust a online service advertised as private/anonymous if it actually supported a private and anonymous currency (like some vpns do).

Anyone claiming high fees is straw manning

Lightning is a meme. Imagine needing a sperate glued on system to be somewhat tolerable at the thing it was created for.

Calling it an experiment would be more accurate than declaring it has already failed.

I don't care for semantics. It's just one of numerous issues making btc unfit as a currency.

I agree that third party stores selling tokens without any account at all would be the ideal solution, but without an account you'd be missing out on many of the features that make kagi worth using like being able to remove certain domains from results or prioritizing types of results over others.

Add the ability to export your account config (yaml?) and use it with privacy pass. Maybe even sync it with git.

To avoid fingerprinting by config, have a page where the community can share and vote on best configs, then clone and use a popular one that suits your needs.

This defeats the purpose of Privacy Pass. Something similar is discussed in the post: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass#:~:text=customizatio...

Their suggestion is that when using Privacy Pass you'd also send "&config=XX" where XX is an ID of a publicly shared config, so that you get the customisation of whatever config you choose without tying the config to yourself, just tying it to the searches you're doing with Privacy Pass.

So while it does add a data point that could help track you, it's not defeating the whole point.

Though the post doesn't touch on "community configs", it does touch on "the ten most popular configs", which would seem to be similar enough for this discussion.

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