I would say VPN and monero are the digital equivalent to a balaklava and cash.

Did you ever use any of those in "real life", or only when committing crimes?

In real life cash and balaklava have other purposes than keeping your identity hidden. (Balaklava may keep your head warm and cash may be the only possible payment in some situations.)

And in real life, both VPNs and anonymous currency have other applications than committing crimes. What's your point?

That they don't have any practical applications other than committing crime?

There are plenty of other practical applications. I guess if you believe that only criminals want privacy it might be hard to see them, though.

Do you also believe that encryption is evil? Those pesky criminals use it all the time.

That is a bit of a straw man ain’t it?

I was talking about the real world use cases for a vpn paid with monero.

Do you want me to sit here and list out all of the applicable and legal use-cases for VPNs and Monero? How many would I have to list for you to change your views? Is there even a number, or is your mind set that VPN = criminal?

I don't think you can give me a single legitimate use case for a VPN with no KYC paid via Monero.

You live under an authoritarian regime that jails you based on the things you purchase.

You said there was no practical application for VPNs or Monero, but now you're shifting your goal posts? I think I have wasted enough brain cycles on this.

It was always and - you can use a vpn for watching foreign tv - cheers!

Maybe I'm sick of surveillance capitalism at every fucking turn? Why do I need to justify my right to privacy? I'm absolutely over mega corporations trying to build psychological profiles of me to determine how to best try to manipulate me into giving them money. Or perhaps I don't trust them to keep the information they gather securely, properly protecting it from becoming part of the next big data breach. That's not even taking into account them turning around and selling it to the highest bidder. Every payment processor has turned dataminer. I'm sick of it. The more places I can use Monero, the better.

How about literally any country that is effectively a surveillance state? It is abundantly clear that you've never lived in or experienced anything remotely close to this since you're incapable of grasping what is probably THE MOST legitimate use case for Monero.

If you really don't see the value of privacy, why not post your various account login credentials here? If only criminals are those with things to hide, surely you will allow us access to your bank, email, etc. You have nothing to hide, why not?

Does that mean that every user replying to this thread is a criminal and have no legitimate use to the VPN?

If you add paid with monero then probably yes.

OK, so using your logic, if you're wearing a balaklava to warm up your head, don't use cash. Will remember that

Well trying to get unfiltered information in a censored country _would_ be a crime.

End-to-end encryption is another tool you should be aware of as a budding cyber criminal. Your government can likely tell you all about how dangerous it is.

Most of us wear a trenchcoat and moustache glasses

I'm a clipart hacker, so I wear a hoodie and sunglasses. Indoors, in the dark.

I find thick black leather gloves really help with my typing too.

You should also wallpaper your room with green binary glyphs

No, this just keeps you private from all private sector actors and friends and spouses

Lets children and other unbanked pay for vpns as they don’t have banking access, they can earn some crypto from someone and bridge that to monero

Tor if you don’t want any private sector logging + additional access to the onion internet

A TorOS if you want more hardened access

Unbanked?

'Unbanked' is a term used in policy circles for people who don't have bank accounts.

For example undocumented migrants, homeless people, people fleeing abusive partners, people with a history of bankruptcy, and so on.

This can be politically important because if the state wants to pay all benefits by bank transfer to keep admin costs down, they've got to make sure even the most vulnerable people in our society can get a bank account.

Of course, usually the unbanked use cash.

One of the flaws of policy circles is that they assume the unbanked are victims. The term, for that sector, is a proxy for the desire and recognition of people lacking access to capital and services, which is what the policy circle really wants to occur and being in the banking system had been the route to that for so long.

Now it is not necessary, with peer to peer digital cash operating in a parallel economy, that allows access to goods, services, investments, insurance, capital and more.

In crypto circles it is also code word for "criminals".

As in for example "banking the unbanked" which translates into "providing extremely expensive banking like services for criminals."

I'll be honest, I've never heard 'unbanked' used in relation to cryptocurrency or criminals before vmception used it above.

I know my drug dealer can't pay duffle bags full of cocaine-covered $100 bills into the bank - but he can still get a personal checking account and pay in $100 a week or so. So I would not describe him as 'unbanked' in the conventional sense.

When the state moves to seize and freeze his bank accounts and flag his unhosted bitcoin addresses, he'll wish he had some Monero and Tornado.cash notes to pay his lawyer with.

Debanked

Notbanked

Sansbanked

And they use Monero instead?

(I am actually curious; who are these people who do not have a bank account but use Monero?)

> And they use Monero instead?

they can use Monero as well, not instead. As there are lots of other interchangeable options for non-banked or unhosted crypto payments and commerce.

> (I am actually curious; who are these people who do not have a bank account but use Monero?)

to me, your question is similar to asking "who are these people that use their cell phone in a subway tunnel" after cellular service was extended underground. the similarity being that the answer is "I don't know" and "you're not going to get a dissertation or a source about it, people just use whats available" and "who cares". What I wrote earlier is just a list of what happens when the expanded availability is there.

Tor at least but there’s likely more. also rumor in the internet goes (and looking to be correct if misguided) the us government identifies its citizens that dl Tor

That's nonsense. There are somewhere between 2 and 8 million users of Tor every day. The vast majority of Tor users are ordinary people that want a little more privacy. What a waste of resources it would be to try to identify and track each of them.

You only need to control majority of tor exit nodes to deanonymize people which many have been doing for a while.

https://therecord.media/thousands-of-tor-exit-nodes-attacked...

they cant see what you do on tor

you can still take flights, get mortgages, enter and leave the country after being on the imaginary or actual list, so why do so many people care?

> So if I want to get started with cybercrime; is Mullvad and Monero the way to go?

Yes.

> Any other tools that I should be aware of?

Like Tor, I hear that Signal is also a great choice for terrorists and extremists as well according to some testimonials from them.

The road to hell is paved with good intensions.

I’ll take the risk of extra crime or terrorism as a cost of privacy as a human right, thanks

> according to some testimonials from them

I'd rather not be that guy... but we have a survivorship bias problem here.

Can I run a Tor node or dark web website behind Mullvad?