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809 sats \ 4 replies \ @viktorv OP 19 Sep 2023 \ on: IVPN Light: short-term VPN access priced in sats, paid with Lightning bitcoin
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:
- Short duration access option, you can get a “throwaway” VPN tunnel for 3 hours or up to 30 days duration
- Priced in sats, not fiat, and it's quite affordable (500 sats for 3 hours)
- Access to 5 exit locations or 1 MultiHop combination
- Pay with BTC Lightning directly - no intermediaries
- No account creation or PII needed
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/
An interesting feature here would be to allow me to run a client that isolates the traffic from my internal net but act as an egress point. This could help vpn be more useful as it would show from residential IP. Maybe by running the client I'd get a cut of the sats, and ya'll get a cut as the provider.
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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.
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I agree for the most part, however I think using lightning one could theoretically come up with an incentive structure to make this work, if traffic out of the tunnel is encrypted(unencrypted traffic is an issue so point well taken), tls interception could be an issue, but would throw warnings on most modern browsers/clients. But I do agree this could cause a lot of issues with non-technical users. I worked on the AWS cloudformation team as a Security engineer, I may go check out your github and see if I can help out in anyway.
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awesome, are Monero payments planned for this service like the regular one has, for those of us more privacy oriented?
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