>no matter what you think about crypto they were probably one of if not the first companies in the world to start accepting bitcoin in 2010

I remember spending north of 25 bitcoins on a month of Mullvad back in those days. I don't remember the exact price, but I do remember mining a single 50 bitcoin block was not enough to purchase 2 months. That is at least $1.2m a month for VPN service if we use today's prices. If they actually held on to any of the bitcoin from those days, I am guessing the company and the owners have no real financial motivation to sell.

> [...] I am guessing the company and the owners have no real financial motivation to sell.

This makes no sense. We don't know what the future of Bitcoin's market cap is going to do. That's why it is speculation.

Personally, I don't see the point of holding any cryptocurrency I own.

You are overthinking my comment. All I was saying is that this company and the people leading it have been involved with bitcoin since the price was measured in cents. It goes back so far that it predates the bitcoin payment processors that would handle transactions and pay you out in your currency of choice. Odds are they have had some stake in bitcoin. They therefore have likely made money as the value of that bitcoin has increased.

And for the record I generally don't have a positive opinion of cryptocurrencies and am specifically down on bitcoin. I am not projecting what the market cap will be in the future. I am simply commenting on its history.

I believe the person you responded to was saying “…and owners have no real financial motivation to sell [their company]” and wasn’t making a prediction on the future price of Bitcoin.

Thanks for the clarification! Makes sense now.

This line of reasoning is disappointingly unpopular. I think it fits a weird pattern of selection effects, where people get rich from very risky ventures (often retconned to have been savvy, precient business decisions) and it's implied that what they did was a good idea. Naturally there's no visibility for other crazy ventures that go nowhere, and it's much less fun to look at people who lost big by getting in on the top floor, chasing the success of people who were pretty smart, but very lucky.

Ultimately your expected marginal value for speculative investments where you don't have significant expertise or scale or regulatory capture or magical powers has to be negative.

Speculative investments like that are somewhat like the lottery, though you'd hope people would be a bit more informed to improve their odds compared to the lottery. In which case, your EV may still be negative overall, but if the potential effect size of "winning" is magnitudes larger than your downside risk, it still might make sense if you want a chance to entirely change your circumstances, vs just slowly amass savings over time.

Why would you “[…]” the first part of the sentence that explains exactly why it could have made sense?

Not really. Say I buy Bitcoins in 2012 and sell them in 2014. I paid the very market value in 2012, and received the very market value in 2014. All this 'regret' with 'hindsight 20/20' fails to take into account that one cannot know how the market value is going to be in 1 month, 1 year, or any time table. That is why its speculation.

The above comment doesn't really come down to speculation though. It really just depends how much of that BTC they turned into cash to buy infrastructure or pay people. Considering that it is logistically easier to do this with just money rather than exchanging, then it isn't unlikely that they maintained a fair amount of that BTC, and thus the "they probably have a bunch of money" conclusion.

I'm not sure why FOMO has to do with any of this. Your logic also just doesn't make sense when talking about any investment. If the market value goes up and you continue to hold then you can sell it for more than you bought it for. No one is talking about regret here except you. All investing is speculative. That's the nature of investing.

> The above comment doesn't really come down to speculation though. It really just depends how much of that BTC they turned into cash to buy infrastructure or pay people. Considering that it is logistically easier to do this with just money rather than exchanging, then it isn't unlikely that they maintained a fair amount of that BTC, and thus the "they probably have a bunch of money" conclusion.

Yes, I misunderstood the point.

The US government gets rid of Bitcoins ASAP, and I know of businesses who accept Bitcoin and who also sell it ASAP.

All investing involves some speculation, that's true. But gold and t-bills and startup equity and shitcoins all involve very different kinds of speculation.

Would we be having the same conversation if they had stock in GAFAM instead of Bitcoin?

Maybe if it was the early days of Microsoft. Even then there was a lot more data available about investing in businesses, even revolutionary computer ones. Nobody had knew for sure what was going to happen with Bitcoin, and the plausible outcomes varied hugely.

Yeah but if someone was buying a service from you in MSFT and you didn't need to cash it all out to pay expenses and salaries, would you? Or would you keep some of the stock saying "ehhh fuck it. Let's see what happens?"

Also, considering that early day cryptocurrency enthusiasts were also bullish on the technology that adjusts the chance that they'd keep some. I'm not sure why this is such a debate. The original comment just said "hey, they might have kept some of that crypto that people would pay them in. If they did, then they probably don't have to worry themselves with money." That's a speculative comment but also has a decent likelihood of being true.

ouch, and geez, and ouch.

Same boat with hosting services. 100% relatable.

I remember spending $20 on a plain medium cheese pizza in 2010. If only I instead bought BTC with that $20 and held it until today.

What exactly is the difference between our scenarios?

“It is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.”

The commenter you are replying to, had and sold, but you never had at all.

I had and sold at $1k/BTC. Thought I made out like a bandit considering what I paid for BTC/had mined it using free resources.

But my point stands: the idea that just because you had BTC at some point doesn’t really negate the fact that you had no prior knowledge. If you did, I bet you would have spent all your money and took out huge loans to buy more BTC at $2 or even $0.20. It’s a fallacy to think that just because you actually converted $ to BTC that somehow makes your lost opportunity cost more special than if you just held/spent $.

They have the most anonymity-friendly signup flow I've ever seen:

1. Literally click a button on the homepage

2. Here are the automatically generated credentials for your new account, which you can load up by sending any amount of cryptocurrency (perfect for emptying out an old wallet)

I don't even bother renewing, that's how easy it is to make a fresh throwaway. Which they encourage!

Mullvad is THE ONLY mainstream VPN that doesn't have seriously questionable credibility.

Not even Proton VPN is OK - sleuths have figured out that it's just a white-labeled version of NordVPN.

I am thankful that Mullvad is doubling down on their commitment to integrity, because there isn't an alternative.

> Not even Proton VPN is OK - sleuths have figured out that it's just a white-labeled version of NordVPN.

Do you have links to this evidence/proof?

I agree. I have never heard this and it seems unlikely to be true - would appreciate posting research on this.

It's a rabbithole, and you might not be personally satisfied with the standard of evidence. Here is a start for you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23571653

And since the link to [2] in what I linked above is broken, here is the archived version: https://archive.is/iZ2l2

See my child comment below.

There are definitely alternatives. Not sure if some people are just less exposed to the entire market and are unaware that there are choices out there. I don't use Mullvad just because of how large they are.

Do you mind sharing an alternative?

None that I feel comfortable posting to an open board that is so monitored.

>Not even Proton VPN is OK - sleuths have figured out that it's just a white-labeled version of NordVPN.

I haven't heard this. Can you elaborate?

I replied. Check the other comments

#3 "We do use a third party to operate our email service, so we remind you to carefully read #1 again."

#1 "If privacy is of utmost concern, we recommend that you refrain from communicating any personal data to us since plain-text email is not a safe media for communication. If necessary, use PGP-encrypted email."

So, it sounds like emails are stored on a third-party server, encrypted or not? This is sort of unavoidable for email as I understand it.

sorry when i say they dont collect emails, i mean they don't collect your email address. they don't know your email when you use their service. your "username" is just a random string of numbers. there is no email. there is no password. i dont know anything about how they store their personal email stuff. since they don't have my email address and i've never needed to send them an email, i'm not particularly worried about it.

i should have been more clear though (and i updated my original comment to reflect this)

> So, it sounds like emails are stored on a third-party serve...This is sort of unavoidable for email as I understand it.

They don’t have to store the mail on a third party server.

Email is by definition stored, at least until you retrieve it, so that’s unavoidable.

They could use some public key scheme where they encrypt incoming mail and only the user could decrypt it, but it definitely would be a lot of work. A read buffer’s worth of plaintext would exist briefly in their server’s RAM. I suspect this is more work than any but a tiny number of users would want to deal with.

Can you expand on:

"bitpay or whatever other company that just funnels right into chain analysis companies"

Is that risk with bitpay? Curious to learn more about chain analysis I thought they would analysis all transaction..

Service providers and exchanges are required to abide by the new travel rule imposed by the FATF. They simply can't facilitate any transactions that's on a no-name basis.

Excuse the ignorance, but what do they do when LEO knocks and asks "At 2:34am CST, we saw IP address <x.y.z.w> downloaded child porn. Who was it?"

They just say "We don't know"? Aren't there consequences for letting people download illegal content via your servers?

It seems likely that they would say "At 2:43am CST, the IP address proxying <x.y.z.w> was <your actual IP>," at which point LEO would knock on your ISP's door. Right?

I think it's totally crazy (as in actually-insane) to trust your life to these services. You're right, you can't really be sure. And if you're in a situation where you need to protect your identity, you're already caught.

Take a look at https://mullvad.net/en/help/swedish-legislation/

Thanks! I didn’t expect to be retracting my claims, but I retract my claims.

I wouldn’t trust my life to it, and I still think it would be crazy to. But if I ever need a VPN, I’ll go with mullvad.

Wow, I have been looking for a service like this.

So the main thing risk would be if they are consistently logging things such as client IP, user agent etc.