These consumer-oriented VPN services marketing to bittorrent users seem kind of sketchy to me.
How many VPN's companies has deals with content networks? How many ISP has a content network deal?
How many VPN's has has a past of cooperative with government surveillance? How many ISP has cooperated with police and government secret police?
How many VPN's has lobbyist in government. How many ISP's has lobbyists in government?
An ISP has all the reasons to snoop at the traffic of their users, and they commonly do. Their core product is advertised as an service that provides Internet connectivity. Their core product is thus not effected by much if they get caught snooping on their users. A VPN has few reasons to snoop (QoS is the major exception), and their core product is to provide privacy. If they are caught snooping, their core service of providing privacy suffers.
Thus, yes. I trust more a VPN provider than an ISP.
ISPs, on the other hand, provide a different service and privacy is merely an additional consideration. It's not their main reason to exist.
Not even that. Look into CALEA - a law which, summarized briefly, requires that ISP gear have backdoors for law enforcement packet capture.
There's a reason you don't see anonymous ISP's around in the USA; the laws as written explicitly prevent them from existing in any meaningful capacity.
Yeah, but given the lack of history, openness, and reputation a lot of the VPN providers have, it seems to me that a provider could just "pick up and move": start a new company with a new name and new IPs and what not, and just do it all over again.
You probably shouldn't. There are most likely laws against your ISP from listening in on your traffic, not for your VPN. If the government wants to listen in it doesn't matter, your VPN service is forced to cooperate anyway so you haven't gained anything.
If I'd use a VPN I'd make sure to use one that is in another country, probably making it a bit harder to connect the VPN and ISP to you that way - but hardly bulletproof.
Of course, the providers there could be lying about not keeping logs, but it's interesting none the less.
The VPN account is directly tied to you by your payment details. Also most VPN services that claim to "not keep any logs whatsoever" are just a 3 page website with not much information. Maybe that's safer since they are low profile, or maybe it isn't? I honestly have no idea and I wish I did.
It feels like your just trusting some random person to not mess with you.
I guess my problem is more that you are trusting an overall unknown entity with your real ip, which is only one step away from your real info for someone who is able to compel that information from the VPN provider in the first place.
Buying bitcoins anonymously is very difficult due to money laundering laws. Spending them anonymously is not "simple" either.
Your best bet would be to mine them yourself and then pay over a public wifi with a throw-away laptop.
But really, cash in an envelope is less error-prone. Just don't leave your DNA-sample on it.
- I mine
- you can buy them to your name, and then after a few transfers/transactions it would take the collaboration of an army of disparate users worldwide to determine where did the coins come from
- #bitcoin-otc in freenode
Although I do agree that's not easy to grasp for outsiders. It takes some time to get familiar with the best options. There's no way in hell they can connect your id with your coins (or a subset of it you keep for stuff like this) if you are moderately careful. Even satoshi-dice does the trick.
Sounds exactly like money laundering to me, even if there isn't malicious intent. I'm genuinely surprised the government hasn't done much to try killing off bitcoin, even with it being (relatively speaking) a tiny fringe movement.
What muyuu is talking about is akin to wiping your dollar notes, to remove any dna evidence that you ever touched them
Conventional banking assigns each new identity that enters through the door an account, to access that account you prove your identity. All transactions are kept confidential and in-house.
Bitcoin works by giving everyone an account and forgoing any identification. If you own the private key to the account you are the account holder. Next, all transactions are publicized. Since no one has ID information tied to their Bitcoin wallet, it doesn't matter if transactions are publicized.
Now here is how you get found out. If you use a service such as Mt. Gox which requires you to tie your identification to your Mt. Gox account, any bitcoins you send from Mt. Gox can be traced. So, when you corrupt bitcoins by using a site that has id on you, you lose your anonymity.
OpenVPN is all you need and then you're good to go.
The main selling point of a VPN is to avoid suffering your ISPs craptastic network. It isn't anonymity.
If you want true anonymity, use tor.
Of course, your VPN can still _choose_ to log your IP address (e.g. if they're acting as a honeypot), so at some point you have to trust someone (perhaps by looking at whether there have been news reports of that VPN handing over data to other entities, ie. don't use HideMyAss).