TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #392: Resisting Online Surveillance with Viktor from IVPN

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

Join Marty as he sits down with Viktor from IVPN to discuss online privacy and the surveillance traps set by online companies, including most VPNs. Follow Viktor on Twitter: https://twitter.com/vonthedock Check out IVPN: https://www.ivpn.net/ 6:10 - VPN convention 10:42 - VPNs explained 16:23 - VPN traps 19:23 - TOR 23:10 - Running your own VPN 26:30 - Vetting VPN services 35:23 - Wireguard 39:28 - Paying for a VPN privately 42:09 - LN privacy and Monero 45:33 - Fedimint 53:14 - Viktor's story, don't be a coomer 1:05:55 - Attacks on IVPN 1:07:59 - How the current internet makes VPNs necessary 1:12:22 - Expanding IVPN 1:17:34 - State attack vectors on VPNs 1:22:50 - Final thoughts 1:26:02 - Plugs Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital River TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

What's up, Freaks? It's your boy Marty here to introduce this rip of TFTC. I sat down with Victor from IVPN. Very enthralling conversation. If you're a VPN user, you want to learn more about the industry, more about how everything works, the things to look out for, this episode is for you. if you're just a privacy advocate or just interested in interesting conversations this is the rip for you top four boost of rip 391 the epic of sudden deaths epidemic of sudden deaths with ed dowd at eric99 50 000 sats thank you for everything you do keep up the great work

stay humble stack sats eric thank you for supporting this show rabbit hole recap citadel dispatch and i see your activity on unfound you're quite active thank you for the support of this show and all the others that you support at mark c 1000 sats no no uh no message there at nick underscore dose 169 nice sats cheers at joel w 111 sats nice palindrome boost the new narrative coming out is why didn't the anti-vaxxers warn us about the injections we did we were told to die i remember that but again if you listen to the adult episode we need to stop the adversarial mindset between the division mindset that the propaganda is thrust on us if you haven't listened to that

episode. I highly recommend you go listen to it. Very important conversation and ends on an optimistic note. This rip was brought to you by our good friends at River. It's a Bitcoin company built by Bitcoiners for Bitcoiners versus an exchange. If you want to buy Bitcoin, River is the best place to do that. Why? Because they build their own infrastructure. They don't have any trusted third parties. They don't depend on anybody like Prime Trust. They've built their own exchange and their own wallet infrastructure uh why else should you buy bitcoin on river if you dca into bitcoin on river you get no fees it's a beautiful thing uh and again they're bitcoiners building for bitcoiners they want you to self-custody they encourage you to self-custody

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bitcoin company for bitcoiners by bitcoiners you may already have your exchange that you're using But if you want to check off the list of making sure your Bitcoin is secure with a company run by Bitcoiners, integrating all the latest tech like Lightning, River is the exchange for you. Go to river.com slash TFTC. This report was also brought to you by good friends at Unchained Capital. They're down the hall. Like River, they're looking to eliminate single points of failure. But for you and your self-custody model, they do this with their Vault product, which is a two or three multi-sig Vault. you hold two keys

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river unchained for my businesses want to do multisig with partners it's perfect way to do that it's a beautiful thing do it for multiple businesses that i run so go to unchained.com slash concierge set up a consultation for an individual a family office just a business wants to hold bitcoin hit up their concierge team use the code tftc you'll get fifty dollars off that concierge onboarding enjoy this rip with victor very insightful learned a lot you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts.

So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Victor. Hi. How's your week been?

pretty busy what are you in town for again yeah i'm in time for a conference uh meeting of uh vpn related people vpn providers uh people that uh develop technologies protocols and uh we got together just to get acquainted a little bit work together on stuff and uh uh yeah and i had some like nights nights out as well away from the family a little bit of a chance to go wide so yeah but now i'm very rested and ready to go so just had one interruption with a disgruntled married couple last night yeah i woke up at like 3 a.m and they were like breaking up stuff like that shooting uh like curse words at each other and like just uh yeah it's i don't think that they are together anymore but i don't know maybe i'll check on them i go back to my

hotel yeah just knock up hey guys i heard some problems last night i just want to talk you through this yeah some mediation yes that would be nice not gonna happen there's nothing worse of uh not that it's happened to me but i can't imagine anything worse than getting into a blowout fight on a trip with your wife in a hotel room and they're just forced to stay in the hotel room yeah i don't know how i mean i've heard some like uh walk-in shouting on the corridor as well so i'm not sure how they pulled it off but yeah i was just thinking there are like i don't know 200 rooms in this hotel so why the one next to me but that's what it is it's just the way it is and so free freaks that are unaware victor is the coo of ivpn that's right very happy to have you

guys as a sponsor on rabbit hole recap likewise and so what you know you came to the commons yesterday we hung out for about an hour and a half just getting to know each other better and hear about the week what what's a vpn conference like it seems like you guys are on the cutting edge of privacy and protecting individuals from either corporations or governments that want to surveil on them i have to imagine it's a pretty heavy conference yeah uh i have to add so like we we were the vpn company that that's most focused on privacy uh and security there was a lot of entities who care more about the censorship circumvention part which means they work with people in iran providing access to millions of people and there is some tension

between access and privacy so for example at this conference with people from from google for example uh because they have a vpn product that that that focuses on this but they don't care about the privacy aspect and there was some conversations about this like i mean if you if you are in iran your first thing that you are concerned about is getting access and that's fine but there are a lot of um untrustworthy abusive entities the iranian government might be running a vpn telling you that like okay use this it's free it's great it's working and then they surveil the traffic inside the tunnel so it's a little bit tricky so yeah i was i was here mainly to provide that balance i was the guy who was always like standing up at every session saying like no

don't don't track the data don't share the data some vpn providers don't care about that much so yeah yeah and i guess that gets into the question can you have like pure end of day censorship resistance without privacy at the end of the day because yes the accessibility may be there but like you said if the iranian government's running the vpn service and yes you may have access to these services online but they can see what you're doing and then go find you in meatspace and shut you up because that all for not that's right and there was a guy as who's a iranian i think he's not living there but he's working very closely with a lot of activists over there and he was like making a point not not being like hyperbolic like guys children are dying

because you know uh because people um tunnel that traffic through untrustworthy entities and that's uh yeah that's scary but yeah so our focus ivps focus is mainly on the mass surveillance so we have some obfuscation technologies but uh yeah we don't we don't uh target these areas weird this is this is a big big problem to solve and we care more about the uh about the privacy and sovereignty aspects so yeah yeah and so i guess for the freaks out there who may be new to VPNs. They may use one, but they just know the marketing. Okay. You're going to get privacy. You're not going to be surveilled. You're going to have access to sites you might otherwise not have access to. What, how would you describe what a VPN provider, let's just use

iVPN as the example, like what in plain words, do you guys actually do from an infrastructure perspective yeah uh so yeah in very plain short terms um what a vpn does is it encrypts the traffic between your device and the vpn server and that gives you protection against anyone who's between these two points and that's important so like that uh your isps between that someone is operating the wi-fi you are connecting to the airport uh hotel uh that's that's between that so they are not able to see uh what's going on with your with your internet connection that's good but this comes with a couple of caveats because uh then when your traffic leaves the vpn server then it becomes unencrypted so it's not like you know everything that you do will be not visible

to anyone and when you use google and facebook it's gonna get uh you know obfuscated or you know it's not gonna help you with your uh i don't know uh uh chain analysis and stuff like that so it's just like vpn is not a like a one button solution to all the privacy needs you have is just one tool in the toolbox yeah one tool in your belt but it's a very powerful tool it's uh gives me peace of mind when i turn on the vpn i know i mean we've had to use vpn here in the commons because there's a firewall up because some of the disgusting creatures down at unchain capital were were pirating stuff they shouldn't have been pirating so for a time i wasn't able to get on my btc pay server but we fixed that problem but yeah i mean vpn is a very

important tool in the tool belt like i mean we don't have to get deep into bitcoin yet we'll definitely dive into bitcoin but just sticking to like the vpn landscape what what does that look like you mentioned like google's running a vpn uh yesterday we're talking about like express vpn and um internet access private internet access and what's your opinion on the competitive landscape of the vpn world uh well it's a pretty shady industry so uh there's a lot of actors that are clearly dishonest or you can make an educated guess and judge that they are dishonest but yeah there are like hundreds of vpn companies part of my job is to know them and see what they do and like like understand uh their game uh yeah and the biggest ones uh express north uh pia some others

so they they are like they are raking in hundreds of millions or like expressvpn was sold for like a billion dollars that's uh that shows like the the the extent uh and the size of the industry and the biggest players they use um methods they they're on their website they're on their services they're on their marketing most importantly in a way that's really not friendly to privacy and a lot of times dishonest and this is how they grow to this size so if you have a vpn company that has um enough money and they promise everything to the users it's going to protect you from everything it's going to give you anonymity that's the biggest people of mine really gets angry talking about that but a lot of vpn companies promise anonymity uh and

that's just not true so that's puts their users at risk because they expect that is going to be like a one button solution so that's the that's one of the biggest issues with the with the big companies and the second one is the principle so like these companies that after a certain size they're just raking in so much money they are definitely going to put profits before principles which means that when they have to make choices and trade-offs between privacy and gross they are going to go with the gross so like giving a lot of money to google for example you might have different views on that i'm pretty uh hardcore in this regard i we are not advertising google on facebook we don't want to give money to this whole surveillance-based ads operation

that's a ethical choice we've uh like uh thought hard about so the the biggest companies uh they do a lot of stuff like they have trackers on the websites trackers in their apps and everything is is uh it's it's it's a marketing operation a big juggernaut that as that doesn't really make the kind of choices that you would be uh you would expect from a company running a privacy tool at least you know that's my uh my personal view so the way we run ivpn and some there are a lot of vpns out there let's say 405 that have similar views uh they were here at this conference we talked about this a little bit and we might try to do something together to educate users a little bit better uh because there's there's a long like let's say laundry list of things that you can

check for vpn company and um the biggest companies fail at at a lot of like check marks there so Yeah, what are some of the catch-ups that users can fall into if they enter into, they use a certain VPN that's marketing something like privacy and it'll protect you from surveillance and they get this false sense of security and decide to use the VPN? What are some of the sort of slip-ups that those customers wind up making because they think the VPN is actually protecting them when it isn't? yeah i think the biggest one is is expecting that they are going to protect you from the services

that you use so uh yeah google is a clear example of like any kind of messaging facebook messenger whatsapp uh whatsapp was probably not a good example because that's encrypted but so um like whatever you do on a website and you could use your personal information there and you so you can be identified by an entity like an app or a website through other means so vpn when you go to a website the biggest um benefit of the vpn is is your ip address getting obfuscated so they will see the ip address of the of the vpn server so they won't be able to use that data which is an ip address is like a personal identifier information and they can use that data to create a profile of you and then check what you've been doing and

maybe track you across sites as well but if you use a vpn that's that's going to obfuscate it but there are many other ways to track you so they might use some sort of a device fingerprinting where they check what type of device you use your screen size they might use tracking cookies and so there are many other ways to track you build a profile of you if you pay they will have your payment information and they can call it off of that so uh it's very easy to think that uh that after you use a vpn everything you do is just completely uh anonymous the end going back to the anonymity thing um so vpns won't make you anonymous that's just not that's just not possible there's so many ways that you can leak your

information um and um and the vpn so like we can go into the threat models a little bit and like what uh what actually the vpn companies can protect you from and what what are their threats um to attack their users but that's maybe a little bit going into the weeds but if you want anonymity and you do stuff that's really important to correlate your identity from your activities tor is a better option for you and that's why a lot of companies uh who want to give um anonymity to their users um they they build in tor uh if you if you are you know in bitcoin and use the services hardware wallets and mixing services they rely on tor for this reason which also have some uh drawbacks but that's uh yeah that's yeah tor contour can we trust tor

uh i can make that choice for you just like with a bpn it's hard i mean um it depends on what you use it for um but yeah there are many attack vectors and there are many many risks there so um for yeah it's hard i mean um it has some let's say red flags generally like the whole uh u.s government yeah u.s government funding that's usually okay but like i mean uh i can i can argue i'm not you know defending the whole concept but you can argue that it's it's been um also built as far as i know and i've read the like the history uh for uh for you know cia folks you know to to use and if they trust it in a sense that rely on it um the the technology itself uh that means that the basic underlying principles are intact in terms of like

the government surveillance um i mean yeah so like so just to very very um quickly just a rundown of how it works so you have three hops um and uh the entry node uh does not show where your traffic is going so they don't see the the traffic exiting the tour network and the exit node doesn't know who you are because they don't see the ip address uh and there is a guard node in in between so you know the concept is good uh it's open source um and then you can you know anyone can poke holes in it and they do so conceptually it works the problem is the like if you uh control enough of nodes specifically exit nodes and entry nodes then you can correlate with different attacks timing attacks in different ways correlate the traffic going in and coming out and and it's

possible and so i mean can you trust it i think you can trust the underlying technology um and it depends on your threat model and who what you're concerned about who can potentially survey your traffic and what's the worst case that can happen uh if you're concerned about the us government and you do some stuff that is really uh sensitive in this regard i probably wouldn't use store but there are not many great options out there there are people working on these problems there's i2p which i haven't used i don't know much about but i know that it exists and some people use it um and there's some new stuff going like coming out but uh yeah so vpns are are not solving that problem but the vpns are more uh dependable um more reliable speed is

better but then you have to trust one centralized entity so with tor you don't have to do that um but with uh with the vpns all the traffic that you tunnel through that service uh it's yeah so the vpn provider can do anything with it essentially they can see anything uh they can they can uh build profiles they can sell the traffic they can they can sell it to data brokers and some vpn companies do so that's why the trust is very important in the vpn as well Yeah, there's trade-offs with everything. A couple comments here, like going back to Tor, maybe one thing that highlights that it may be working and useful

is the fact that it's being DDoS attacked. So it's being attacked by a government entity. Maybe it's because it's working and they don't want it to work anymore. And then back to VPNs, the difference between Tor, which gives you some pretty ideal privacy if it actually works, which you can make the argument that it certainly does since it's being attacked, VPNs are different in that you hide in a crowd, that the VPN provider provides you that forum to hide in a crowd, correct?

That's right, that's right. So like that effect of connecting to a VPN server, ideally there are many other users there, 50 plus, 100 plus, and that gives you this so-called crowding effect that you share the IP, you share the traffic going into that server. so whoever is trying to do this um these uh correlation attacks against the vpn server so uh the way this works is the um on the the data centers where the vpn servers are if there's a compromise there and they work together with an adversary

they can try and correlate the packets coming in and exiting the server so they they see the ips and they see the traffic exiting uh but they they cannot tell you exactly what what i i'm as a person are you using ivpn uh sending into that that's encrypted so the data center won't see that um but there are some ways to uh to uh do attacks to uh that traffic so that that kind of crowding effect uh blending in the crowd that's that's how it works and that's why it works and that's why it's generally not so there's some advice go out there which is fair in some regard is that run your own vpn you can run your vpn it's quite straightforward now there are ways to do that so google's one of the google's projects is actually it's called the outline

and um and they they they work on this they provide an opportunity for people to run their own vpn for their communities and then and their families and you know for this anti-censorship stuff that's good um but it has these risks that you know you set up your own vpn on digital ocean or some other other provider and use it yourself or maybe two or three people using it uh it's pretty easy to um you know connect it all that traffic to uh your your identity so that's why it's not if you care about privacy uh then it's probably and you are concerned about some of these aspects that you you can be surveilled it's probably not a good idea to run your own vp and it's gonna it's gonna protect you from uh so it's gonna encrypt your traffic it's gonna provide

some security benefits but but for privacy it's not it's it's not a good solution is that only if you depend on a third-party cloud provider like how hard is it to spin up your own vpn with your own hardware um not so hard but the problem is that if if you're if you run your own server and that gets attacked uh so that's i mean or get seized or something like that then you know out of luck yeah so um essentially what you are outsourcing with that to a vpn provider like ivpn is to you know you trust them with the uh information security aspects that it's not going to get compromised not going to get hacked and then you also get the the crowding effect so So that's why it's generally better for privacy.

Yeah. And going back to our discussion yesterday, when you were in the comments, you're saying when an individual is basically doing their shopping for a VPN service, there's some heuristics, particularly around pricing, that can give a user signals as to whether a VPN is actually working on their behalf or using them as some sort of data mule to sell to data brokers.

yeah so when you are evaluating vpns there's a lot to look for um and i have uh i i have a long list in my mind but like one thing that's immediately red flag for me is the you have to consider their business model how they make money most of the free vpns uh that's we can start there that's um usually red flag there are some services that have like paid tiers and free tiers and um and they can be trustworthy uh there are a couple but not many uh but if if if you use a free vpn they have to make somebody somehow so they the most likely scenario is that they that they sell your traffic um in in some way uh it can be used for many many purposes and the other thing is if the vpn is very cheap so you can get some vpns for like lifetime deals and stuff like that

for 60 bucks i mean just generally lifetime how do you how do you service someone you know for the next uh 40 years 50 years whatever uh it's just not sustainable and so if you if you see a vpn that's like costing like um for three three years uh 60 bucks or 50 bucks under under two dollars generally you know there's costs a lot of costs associated with running the service just the bandwidth running the servers and just keeping the operations going so if it's very very cheap under two bucks per month that's that's probably uh you can make a guess that they are they have to make some some extra extra revenue in your traffic so that's not really good what are some of the other harass heuristics that people should be aware of when they're shopping around

for vpns yeah some of them are easy to check some of them not so much if you don't have the background or you don't know much about the underlying technology uh yeah the first one for me is uh definitely the how they communicate what they promise so stuff like a lot of big vpns like go with promising anonymity perfect privacy that's just like i mean i what's i don't even get it but um they promise um yeah and stuff like saying like military grade encryption uh which is just like a marketing buzzword there's such thing doesn't exist uh so how they communicate that's that's definitely one um and uh yeah some important stuff to look for whether they have open source uh apps at least um that's that's that's that's a clear distinction between vpns that i

trust and i don't that they they don't have open sourcing open source apps there's no scrutiny to what's happening on the on the upside um yeah audits uh that's that that's a tricky one for like an average user let's say because it's hard to know what kind of audits to trust a lot of vpn services have they are like we are audited we have no logs audits and they are audited by auditors that have you know no idea what what they're looking for and uh so audits are tricky uh the scope matters who's doing the audit matters and yeah audits are just uh like uh snapshot in time so let's say i do a knowledge audit asking auditors to look into our systems or infrastructure and they say okay we find new evidence that that that you're logging and the

next day i can just change change the code i can just change the configuration of servers and i can start logging immediately so that's why this is so security audits are there to improve the systems it's a signal for you you know that that's that you can reasonably uh trust um a service but uh but it's not like a stamp of approval that you can just okay so they are immediately good um well let's stick on audits for a second because that's like one thing I mean, in Bitcoin, with CoinJoin implementations, the coordinators are saying, hey, we're not logging. And you just essentially have to trust

that they're not logging similar things with lock explorers. So, hey, we're not going to log your traffic when you're pinging the explorer for a particular address. That's a big question, like how do you give an end user confidence that logging hasn't happened? You can never have perfect confidence because you can never really know, but what is, like, what is it like?

Like, how do you actually, like, not log? What's the process that goes in there? So the question is, like, how do we prove that or how do we? How do you prove, first, how, like, when traffic comes through, like, how do you not log that? Like, it feels like it has to be logged at least ephemerally for a certain period of time do you delete data do you simply not store it yeah not store it i mean there's the the so if if yeah i have uh colleagues who could explain this much better

than i do like the actual technical implementation but the the basic concept is like when so on the servers uh you have the function for this to create the logs and it just goes to null so like i mean it just goes to void uh so so i mean you can going into the i know the the physics and the metaphysical aspects so i mean there there is a point in time where that information exists in our systems but it's but it's it's immediately gone yeah yeah so only um and the way to and that's that's touching could be touching on another trust aspect is the is the privacy policy of the of the vpn provider so if you check the privacy policy of the vpn provider you have a couple of different ways that providers approach it one is that it's a very convoluted

legalese you know like these very very long explanations and nobody reads that nobody reads exactly and we and when you attempt to read it you just get you know just like get a headache in like two minutes uh and in those usually not always but usually there's all these exceptions and all this like in the event of and like and they they they try to you know uh make it so that they don't have to use you know assume liability for all this stuff um and if you dig deeper there's usually like in some cases with certain third parties we share the information to improve the service and for marketing purpose and that's that's the stuff that like you will find in some of the big big players and if you care about privacy and you want a service that actually respects that then you

just immediately just just go away um what's yeah uh and the better vpns a couple of out there us as well uh we have a very clear concise privacy policy that is actually like the question and answers if like if i if i were talking to you when you were asking me all these questions we just like uh spread it out very clearly and for us we explained that we we only log one thing um which is uh one user how many connections they have initiated and we have a temporary log of this no identifying information just a number one device two device three device four device and if all the connections are closed then we discard it so we cannot give it you know retroactively so going back in time we cannot give that information yeah and of course yeah i mean you need to lock

some stuff in the sense that like for example we have server um information graphs and like connection informations and we need to understand the aggregated information of what's happening on the server so for example to we have a server that has a one gigabit bandwidth cap and you know if if we see that the aggregated bandwidth on that server is getting close then we have some alerts and we have to, you know, increase the bandwidth, install new servers. So you can argue that that these are logs, you know, of course. But the logs, the most important question is, is this is these logs are ones that concerns the user, concerns that data, concerns

their personal data, personally identifiable information. And yeah, for that, we don't we don't log anything. So, yeah. Yeah. And you said one of the heuristics, the important thing to look out is, is your VPN service leveraging open source software? Are they building their apps in an open source fashion? And then one thing that we touched on yesterday that we should probably dive into is WireGuard,

which hit the scene in 2017 and provided this open source sort of architecture for VPN services. What has WireGuard meant to the VPN industry? Yes, WireGuard, before WireGuard, the main protocol was OpenVPN, n which is a like a very old convoluted uh slow uh protocol um and the wire guard essentially uh jason who's uh um well that's sort of like um that protocol uh his idea he've seen that there is a

need for for for a new new approach for this so the the main properties and why it's really good is because it's it's very fast and the code base is very short so it's easy to audit and it just the whole focus is of what it solves is very narrow so for that reason it's very easy to build build on it and when it came out um a couple of companies uh like started building on using it right away so the first ones uh there was one smaller vpn company but mova definitely was the first uh it was deployed on the servers and we were the first to um to bake it into our apps so that's that was a like a pretty nice achievement for ivpn uh got we got some press for that and uh some uh yeah that was a that was a great project for us um yeah but but wireguard

has a couple of issues which i cannot explain in like detail but it's not built for privacy generally so you have to solve a couple of issues uh like around key rotation um and how so if you just deploy it right away into your vpn service it's gonna it's it's going to not going to provide so-called perfect forward secrecy so things when so the key rotation part is important because that generates new key pairs in given time frames and that essentially discards the connection and the information between who's the client and service so like you you essentially create a new persona something like that that's the that's the easiest way to explain it so you had to solve all this all these problems and a lot

of providers didn't jump on the chance to implement it because they they thought that they can solve it and um and they were afraid that like wire guard is not ordered enough and stuff like that but the forward singing providers like jumped on that uh pretty early on and now you will see it in for for most providers yeah and the other thing is um some providers which i personally don't like uh what they've done is taken the wider protocol and it's open source anyone can build on it which is which is great uh but what i've done is like uh built their built their protocol on top of the wire guard uh code base and added some stuff like to make it faster or make it work better for censorship circumvention this is fine and they've given it another name

and now they use it like okay so we have the lightweight protocol we have this and that's i mean it just uh i mean just use the thing it's bad open source yeah yeah something like that so uh so yeah that's that's the but yeah but wireguard is great uh it's definitely uh uh it was like a let's say revolutionary step um in the industry and uh and yeah that's that's That's the default protocol for us now. And yeah, it's weird. Yeah. And so let's dive into actually using a VPN

in the most private way possible. And we can start with payments for a VPN that you were discussing yesterday that you're disgusted by how many iVPN clients still use PayPal to pay for the service. Obviously, you guys have implemented Bitcoin Lightning Payments, Monero as well. and you have credit card payments as well and so when like a user is actually buying the service

there is some some privacy leak there depending on the payment method that you use that's right that's right yeah so the most private way uh I mean uh the first step is like how much information you give to the service uh and that's so we don't we don't ask for email we don't ask you just press button and you generate an account we don't load your ip we don't do so i mean uh there's no way for us to connect uh any kind of information about you uh at that stage and then you have to pick a payment method the most the best way i guess is me handing you a voucher uh that i don't see so that's uh if you see me anywhere uh not not now you know my face uh and I'm I'm I guess uh you can ask for a voucher so that's that's the that's the best way but you

know going on the list like cash we accept cash you can mail uh cash to us in an envelope with an no identifiable information that's great um of course Lightning using Lightning would be better than on chain for Bitcoin we have we have Monero so if you pick those methods then essentially the service and in this case IVPN will have no way to connect any of this information and anyone who's trying to attack you or attack us the way you do is through payments is to is to subpoena the parent provider so credit card company payment processor like Braintree PayPal and they will see that you are using IVPN and they can and they will come to us okay the good news is that we don't have any kind of other information. So if you trust us and you trust that we do everything as

we say, then that's good. But the payment provider can't give away when you signed up. So essentially, what it can give you is assurance and another way to mitigate the risk of the payment provider essentially outing you as the user of a service. That's why it's important. Yeah, and you mentioned Lightning. This is something Matt and I talk about on Rabbit Hole Recap and something that excites us about more point of sale systems here in the United States implementing Lightning payments specifically is that Lightning certainly has its privacy issues, but that's particularly on the receiving end. From a sender's perspective, you have pretty good privacy. And so paying for IVPN over BTC Pay Server is ideally done with Lightning because the sender privacy is far superior

to on-chain privacy with the UTXO set. That's correct. Yeah, and you touched on the BTC Pay part. So if you want to evaluate the VPN services, and uh want to see who uh cares about this stuff and who cares about Bitcoin for example uh it's very well not that easy but you know if you if you know the btcp implementation and how that looks like uh and and the service communicates it so IVPN and some other services a few of them um accept Bitcoin directly without any kind of intermediaries but most services the bigger

services um everyone uses an intermediary like uh it's pay not sure who has coin coin gate pay imagine open node would be one um yeah a couple others so I mean it's good that they accept Bitcoin uh but uh but that's still intermediary that that will have information about that transaction so uh it's not that good for privacy so you should use a VPN service that Bitcoin directly. And runs their own server. Exactly. Their own BTC Pay server.

Exactly. And you guys are Bitcoiners, right? Because you were mentioning yesterday a lot of those VPN providers that accept Bitcoin but do it via a BitPay or another centralized third party are likely just using it

as a marketing tool and are probably converting the Bitcoin to their local currency immediately. Exactly. So if you have a business and you think about the risks the of uh exchange rates um then if you want to rake in the fiat and use it immediately you know for expenses and all this kind of stuff it's it's it's much riskier to to hold uh hold bitcoin so

yeah you have to you have to mitigate that risk and that's the easiest way to do it just uh yeah just uh just give me the cash so or give me the fiat i'm not sure about the wording so yes we we've been accepting bitcoin for a long time and we we are always on the lookout to help adoption and um yeah the the privacy aspect is definitely what we like we are concerned about so we are on on the lookout to implement stuff into our website and service to help help bitcoiners and maybe work and support projects in the space i'm i spend um a good amount of time on this from my you know time allocated for work and improving ivpn as well so yeah are we allowed to talk about some of the projects you're excited about that we were mentioning yesterday or sure yeah so

ferrament is the is the one that's that's jumped out for me listening to a couple of podcasts um i think uh matt had an episode on the dispatch about it and and some other podcasts so uh yes ferrament um is a um is a project that could be really good for for privacy with in space so uh should i just explain a little bit yeah yeah we can jump into it yeah so uh so federmint um it uses uh so-called chomi and emins um to so bitcoin um i mean yeah i didn't prepare for this part so but so there is a federation of guardians who essentially um act as a sort of a community bank so there's no one entity doing the custody but it's the the trust is distributed and within that community bank um when the bitcoin goes in it

it's it gets exchanged for uh mints it's too many mints um and within that um who's in that in that federation as a user um the money exchanging hands between that it's it's it's it's um it's done with these minted coins and you can spend outside of this federation um through lightning essentially that's the yeah and so these charming events like we we were playing around with cashier yesterday stash not that app if you guys want to try it out but it's really cool like Like you mint these e-tokens, you want to get into the mint, basically create an invoice like, hey, I want 1,000 sats worth of e-tokens and one token is equal to one sat.

In this federation setup, it could be differently set up in others, but for this example, one sat is one e-token. You produce a Lightning address, or excuse me, Lightning invoice, you pay it, and you send the Bitcoin to the mint, converts it to e-tokens, and then bam, you're in the mint uh we should note that that cashew is not federated it's just centralized mint with one one operator but i think it's just a proof of concept to prove what these mints can do um and then once you have those tokens the way these mints work these blinded signatures

within the mint and so when you're sending these tokens inside the mint the blinded signature setup makes it so that the operator of the man whether it be uh one centralized entity or federation of many entities has no idea who's sending what to who exactly yeah that's the that's the part of the concept that i've i've left out there and a very important aspect so that's what it gives you a a lot better privacy so yeah and then yeah i mean i'm excited about this it's a very controversial topic in the bitcoin space because there is a custody trade-off you are trusting that the federation the guardians in the mint aren't doing anything like rug pulling you or sneaking inflation into their mints on the back end but running with the theory that some

mints can be trustworthy if you can trust the guardians and the mint it could ideally be a very very incredible solution to the privacy problem that exists within Bitcoin particularly on chain with the UTXO history exactly and that's why we are excited by it and that's why that's what I've identified as an opportunity for us to contribute because what as a VPN service the biggest thing that we have is trust um I mean not for everyone like someone's first hearing about us I'm I guess just building the trust but uh for a lot of people known ivp and used ivpn uh we love users and for them um they would trust us and i think for for the federman concept um that's the biggest question mark for me whether you will have enough for federations with enough trustworthy guardians

uh who you can be reasonably sure that they are you know not going to collude to rock for you so and that's what is going to be the key decider i think on this concept getting validated or not and if we can contribute to that we can find other companies um other privacy tools or some other companies in the space who would want that project to succeed get together build federations one federation multiple federations then we can we can validate this concept so you need to you know uh put your put your weight behind that to trust weight behind that i guess to to make it work so yeah this is also like uh i guess it's an open call if you're listening to this and you you would like to uh be part of that as a company or it can be an individual as well of course

there are some criterias uh for us and for the other guardians who are interested in this we are just putting this together uh of course we won't accept anyone uh but uh yeah we are we are still looking for people who are interested in this so to complete that guardian set yeah and i was i was excited to learn that you're already exploring this and want to be a part of a federation because it just naturally makes sense for many reasons two most importantly like a vpn provider if it's trustworthy and if it it's mission driven and really wants to help individuals uh attain censorship resistance and privacy as they peruse the web uh it would make sense they want to do the same thing when they're transacting and sending value between each other then on top

of that i think you guys are just perfectly suited for this particular use case because they're used to running servers and part of being a guardian is that you need to run a server that has optimal uptime and that's your bread and butter definitely definitely and and also like how you how you uh protect the keys and stuff like that so we are we are in that business so yeah definitely um yeah so yeah excited about that um and um yeah but the the challenge right now is to find find out and find other guardians so like we have no uh because the the interesting thing about this we we have no clear way of profiting from this there's no profit model business model um and uh and also it's it's a risk for us because

if we if if anything goes wrong you know our reputation in other areas can be damaged as well so you have to take that leap and like say okay so we can do some great stuff here and like let's let's let's try and contribute um not many other companies might be so willing uh of course there are risks it's a it's an unvalidated concept but uh yeah i really hope that uh we'll find find more partners for that i do as well i'm really excited about fedements i know it's again controversial bitcoin but i think the trade-offs are worthwhile and if you can find trustworthy guardians obviously trust is a spectrum you can never have perfect trust except for the only perfect trust you can ever have is with yourself and your thoughts and your

mind um but it's this weird nebulous area that we find ourselves in and i guess we can jump into that like trust like listeners who are basically saying like why why should i purchase a ivpn subscription are these guys legit like why have you decided to dedicate your life to not only the vpn space but ivpn specifically like what gets you out of bed every day to to evangelize what you guys are doing at ivpn sure i mean there's um one so about the service um so the rcu nick has started it like uh 2009 2010 i'm not sure like when around that yeah around that but yeah so he was working in the uh banking industry as an information security analyst auditor and he has seen like the all the information and the back banks collect and you know he just

freaked out about that so he was looking at different ways to protect privacy and build tools so he was pretty early in that game and then the snowden thing happened which like completely made it much more apparent for people that this is not going to be good and you have to use these tools. Yeah, me personally, a couple of things. I've worked for websites in the adult industry. It's interesting that I've picked up that you've touched a lot about uh don't don't watch porn aspect i i worked in that industry and i i get out because of that

uh i was just thinking about the um like the impact on individuals it got really scary and also the impact on the on the data collection and the advertising so the the the way that the uh that the free porn business model is is built on advertising and the way that it got so super charged and like got so prevalent is because a lot of money uh were put into building good ad networks with good targeting collecting information and the paid sites dating sites campsites membership sites they they've seen that opportunity to subsidize you know the free aspect and there's a lot of tracking and a lot of a lot of profiling going on there so i've seen that from the inside and i got really freaked out about that and for these two reasons i've got out of

the industry and i was i was thinking about what to do with my life um and and then i found ivpn i was looking for someone like me and um and um yeah i just started digging into this whole whole question why it's important and you know it's pretty similar the the privacy and surveillance literature and rabbit hole uh is very similar to bitcoin in the aspect that like if you just go into it and you start seeing everything that's happening it's just there's no escape it's just like it just uh eats eats at your brain it's just like that doesn't stop you from thinking about it that you see all everything that's happening you connect all the dots and it's just like this is just insane i just have to do something to stop this so

yeah yeah yeah the porn industry is warping your mind in your your endorphins and your dopamine exactly and your relationship to women or men and then it's stealing all your data and selling that on the back end it's a very acidic industry yeah i know um no it's and it takes a lot to recognize that that you're involved in is bad and to to step away from it yeah how long did it take you to do that yes i mean uh um so yeah i'm i'm from hungary and uh one of the biggest i.t businesses in hungary is running uh a campsite you know like the the kangaroos yeah yeah andrew tate's getting wrapped yeah yeah yeah so i'm i'm i'm pretty sure like yeah i know i mean i don't know his operation but like i've known people running stuff like that in colombia and

other spaces philippines just exploiting yeah let's not get into that i i got about it for a long time but um uh so yeah so i've so the biggest it businesses and uh you know my focus and my ideas were out i was living on the internet and um i wanted to work in an environment like predominantly english i was like 21 22 and that was the like clearest way to get into the whole uh game so that's why i started there and i spent a couple of years there and uh yeah i've done i've done a lot of different stuff um but yeah but it took a couple of years to get there and the the risk there so if you get into this industry like this um then you build your relationships you build your trust and the the the equity you know and your expertise and if you want to get out

that's completely you know it's it's so shielded off from everything else that it's you you go back to zero you have to rebuild your whole everything that you do so that's why it's it's tricky because it like captures you a little bit and you get into this uh mode where like okay so I just need to find and do something else so it's pretty pretty risky but yeah it was yeah so so uh I've read a study um it was like six years ago seven years ago it was pretty fresh and it was done in Sweden or a large data set like tens of thousands of uh um teens in sweden they had the option to you know get approval for that um and they have surveyed people and looked at different metrics for a couple of years so it was like uh that was a longevity to the whole whole thing and it came

out that like the teenagers who are um um watching porn regularly they yeah this whole warping effect what you're saying so that's that's scientifically proven now i guess i mean of course you know academics and there's always caveats but uh but that that's that study have proved that there is the relationship to sexuality relationship to women generally just the the trust factor and everything else is just like it's it's it's it's like off the charts bad yeah uh so it's and when i read that that was the problem okay so i cannot uh reason against this or denies for myself you know i don't want to i don't want to contribute to this i'm seeing all these numbers millions of people using free porn sites in i don't know bangladesh and india and all this i mean what

the am i doing so i have a soul yeah exactly so that that was no yeah andy and the other thing is like i was thinking about starting a family and singing hard about like okay so i i might have a daughter which i have now and it's just like okay i cannot i cannot do this stuff i mean if she's getting older and it's like okay so like that dad what's your line of work and it's like okay so her dad is a fireman he's that is an accountant and i'm you know i'm peddling free porn that's just that's not something you want to tell your daughter no no definitely not no but you don't even need the studies to recognize that it's warping people's minds i think we're seeing certainly seeing like effects on the dating culture that exists predominantly here in the

the united states with all these dating apps it's it's like people just flip on the app and they go shopping for who they're gonna um do the uh the porn sex acts on exactly and it's it's warping it's created this very degenerate culture and i've admitted on the show too i was i watched a lot of porn growing up but yeah that's similar to me i had children i was like ah i can't be this is they have a mother that i love and this is not yeah this is not uh the way to be living your life but no it's it's got people by the balls literally exactly exactly um but no it's i'm very happy to hear that you recognize that you had a soul got out of it now you're contributing to something that is actually a net benefit to society a massive net benefit and you're combining

two net benefits which would be giving people censorship resistance and privacy and then integrating bitcoin into your stack and you're telling me yesterday you didn't really get into bitcoin until you started working at ivpn is that correct that's correct i mean i had some friends who are like uh uh playing around with bitcoin and uh yeah i remember at one of these companies that we just talked about one um system administrator uh never talks uh very reserved uh you know the bordering on the genius and insane type of person he was like uh comments and saying like uh i have uh mind like i don't know uh tens of thousands of doge coins in 2014. uh i wonder what he's doing right now maybe he's i

don't anyways so yeah that's what i mean i got i got exposed to the concept and just like looking at bitcoin and yeah i've uh when when i started here um yeah i was just like going into death rabbit hole as well and interestingly for a couple of years i was i was really i wasn't saying i was fan of the different icos and like the web sheet concepts but i was i was i was coming from the side where um i i've seen the potential you know in um in in in some projects um and i could see why they are starting their uh own coins and why that concept is something that is that could be useful but yeah over the years just going deeper and deeper and just like seeing i think this this has been said and some people observe but like as as you spend more and more time in the space

you just get narrow and narrow and narrow and just like you just realized i mean for me they're just like two projects and for ivpn as we talked about monero uh yeah so like i mean i i save in bitcoin and i spend in um in monero you might disagree with that that's that's fine i mean the um the monero part but you know i've arrived to the conclusion that everything else is just uh or vaporware or scam in the worst case yeah yeah no i mean we've had uh plenty of monero debates on this show and online and i mean individuals are free to do what they want I'm not going to try and police anybody, I think. And we're very open with this on Rabbit Hole Recap and this show.

I mean, it's objectively true that Bitcoin's privacy assurances are subpar at the moment. That's right. I do think they are getting better over time. They will continue to get better. And I think there's an order of operations to all of this. You need the distributed network. You need to get monetary policy.

you need adoption and protocol improvements and second layer solutions are going to bring much better privacy to bitcoin over time and it is happening as we're mentioning yes chummy nements uh lightning has good center privacy with taproot you'll be able to be able to get better on-chain privacy it's going to bork some of the uh the heuristics that these surveillance companies are using but yeah it's uh it's an interesting conversation yeah it depends on what your use case is yeah for me with monero is like the the potential hidden inflation problem is the what's concerning for me so that's why i wouldn't uh start saving or like holding uh large amounts uh but for buying services it's it's it works out great and uh yeah so that's why

i mean bitcoin is definitely the vehicle my some of my uh i don't know family savings and stuff like that is going going to into bitcoin i wouldn't i wouldn't i wouldn't do that with monero so how does uh feel free not to answer this question but do you guys hold like a bitcoin treasury at ivpn yeah that's the part i don't want i want to talk about okay for like the security reasons i mean i'm i'm not personally i'm not responsible for that area and the person who's responsible for that area would rather not talk about it yeah and you know if if they i mean it's is there a choice so i don't wanna i wanna make the choice here and we don't have to uh all right we can we can go on to uh the one question i forgot to ask earlier but like what

how do you guys get attacked uh you mean just generally for the vpn service yeah yeah do your servers get attacked or are you yeah i mean nothing out of the ordinary i mean it's also hard to like like disentangle what exactly is happening who's doing that and stuff like that but yeah but like um we get ddos of course and various attacks on our login forms and yeah people trying to get into accounts but yeah so the good the good thing is that we are not so big uh so in this respect not yet yeah not yet um yeah i mean we've talked about the marketing and the other part so we have we are pretty hardcore in like in many respects we don't do um ads we don't do youtube sponsorships for like influencers and stuff like that so we are

not very likely to get as big as a lot of vpn companies but that's that's fine i would rather serve the users who respect and understand what we do and like work with them for a long time but yeah so uh so for that reason we are not really in the crosshairs of like uh bigger more sophisticated um entities let's say um and then the other thing is like about the anti-censorship and different parts so we have um we have a free campaign for free access in ukraine and russia because we have some colleagues in um in ukraine and that's like pretty something that's pretty close to our hearts we cannot serve other areas that's just like too resource intensive but for example our service and i don't know probably russian sensors are not listening to

the ftc but who knows this is a global podcast okay uh but yeah we we still in in large parts we still work in russia but a lot of vpn services are blocked so there are some advantages of using a vpn service that is like a little bit off the radar and yeah yeah why has the web gotten to a point where we need vpns that's a good question yeah and this in this conference that i'm attending there was some like questions about this and like some out of the box saying let's say we're like Like, okay, if we were to rebuild the internet, it would definitely build it the way

that you want to take away the surveillance aspect. And it would be nice. We are one of the few services, I think, and this goes back to the principles, before profits, profits before principles stuff. You know, we say, and Nick's been, our CEO has been very vocal about this. If we get to a point where you don't need a VPN,

we'll just close up shop. We'll do something else, re-evaluate where else we can create value, build something else, we don't care. but we are not there yet and we have these conversations like okay so what's going to happen if in any way just a legislation or a meteor or something like just completely it's like destroys the whole context that why we exist and yeah we'll be happy about that because then these privacy issues that doesn't happen but yeah to answer your question like free free is a big

incentive for people and they don't understand the trade-offs just give me this one solution that i can use right now with a good ux and it's free and that's where where we ended up with the gmail that was a big thing i think that's that's a pivotal thing where they realize that like okay so these people really need the freemail service with like one gigabyte i don't know how much was that like the and that's like people are like okay wow they they didn't understand so google understood very well like the the value of the data going into that and the trade-offs that people are making without knowing it but they didn't explain it so like yeah so anyone and it was listening and doesn't notice if you use gmail it gets uh completely scanned analyzed

mined and internally used for surveillance and targeting purposes for all across all google products so yeah another choice we've made a concerted effort to de-google ourselves here at tftc we were discussing it uh not this but we brought up proton mail yesterday and that's what we've the business our email is run on a proton mail yeah um i'm trying to de-google yeah myself as much as possible it's hard though the ux hard is very good yeah and people get hooked on free and that's that that's the point i mean but you you pay with your data you pay with your profiling information and then that's get to a point where uh where you get uh attacked in a sense that like so so what's what's why it's so valuable is because you get profiled

and your attention is very um very um very valuable uh in aggregate and in and in in individual as well so like this whole i have nothing to hide argument against privacy you know that may be true but everything that you do is collected analyze mind and and that's that's very very valuable and then you lose your sovereignty because you get targeted with with ads with misinformation um and uh you know and in in worst cases uh depending on where you live and what happens with you you will get on some lists you will get uh scrutinized and that's the that's the threat with the with the bitcoin aspect so as we move along in this adoption and this whole um tensions between the sovereignty and and and governments trying to control all

the information on the money flows and everything else you know um using a vpn you might not help with the bitcoin privacy problems but you will help with with this aspect the general privacy problems which can prevent uh you know that information that you are visiting sites related to bitcoin you are using uh different services regarding bitcoin you're maybe you're mining bitcoin so you know your ip address will be hidden and so so that that's that helps you with that aspect where you uh won't get on those lists won't get scrutinized um and yeah that's why it's uh it's important maybe it's i've weird off a little bit from our starting point but yeah that's a good good point to bring up but i mean you mentioned that you're exploring uh like chummy mints and

stuff like that and we brought up proton mail obviously a proton mail proton vpn do you guys see your product offering expanding beyond a vpn service yeah we talked about it um two reasons why that hasn't happened yet so one is that um when you use privacy services uh there's an an argument that can be made um that it's not might be not good to put all your eggs in one basket so you're trusting one entity with all your services uh if that service gets hacked or fails or get attacked by government or they just got malicious get become malicious for some reason uh then you're completely fucked and if you just like uh spread it around a little bit then you are just like partially fucked i guess so that's that's that's my argument uh and i we as a business

uh thing that's that's that's a good argument against uh doing this type of thing um and then the the the other thing is like we uh we have a lot of people I I personally and like Nick as well uh we've we've used to work in like big organizations corporate environments a lot of like layers and a lot of uh like uh top-down control and stuff like that hierarchy yeah hierarchy we don't we don't really like that and our business is running on a very flat everyone a lot of autonomy uh there's no you know nine to five there's no like a lot of project management and like accountability in a sense that like you have to submit these reports and like so we are pretty uh open and free in this regard and after you grow you know to a certain size you can't

really do that so if you have having a plan of like getting like capital injection and like big growth and like let's grow the company from 15 people to 30 40 and 50 that's a whole different ballgame and it might happen i'm not saying it's out of the question but it's we are kind of like uh mindful of this uh like the sustainability of the business and just like the gross aspect so yeah yeah and there's i mean not to bring back the bitcoin treasury conversation but it doesn't have to be ivp and specific but Again, if we do believe that Bitcoin adoption is going to continue to increase, which due to the scarce nature of the asset will cause the value of Bitcoin to increase, it does present this unique opportunity for companies like IVPN that would like to keep that flat hierarchy and the autonomy and the scalability of the team and the ability of the team to do what they want without having to sell their soul to actually do that. like which is a really encouraging prospect where the companies like ivpn if they hold a bitcoin

treasury have the ability to self-fund themselves in the future off of bitcoin's price appreciation and actually do things the right way without having to sell out definitely yeah and like i mean uh and this brings to another point uh which is the price so our our service is uh on the more expensive side let's say i mean i think fair not like uh crazy so i think it's very fair yeah so it's like um for our pro plan which is the full plan it's 100 bucks per year and longer plans are cheaper um but it's when i talk about this and get and people ask about this uh we have to point out that like so we we don't uh smaller companies don't have different advantages like economies of scale so negotiating uh costs on the cost side you know

the bandwidth costs server costs and um and we um use the money we get to well on one end you know to improve the service of course and for activism as well privacy related anti-surveillance activism um but we also like do it all this like the the management of our savings everything else very prudently specifically to provide that stability and and and longevity so like for vpn service that's that's very important uh that you don't get into a situation where you have to shut down when people are on like two or three year plan plans and also you don't get compromised because of that so because if you have if you get into situations so let's say we have a big recession coming uh which well we're probably already in it yeah uh so yeah some a lot of companies will fail

a lot of companies might sell out so they they they get um definitely get um offers all the time to monetize the data in other ways they get acquisition offers from uh entities that i wouldn't trust gets very centralized which is not good so they might end up in in that situation and And we are running a business in a way that provides resistance against that. So if you pay for IVPN, you support that model. So that's the stuff. Again, I think it's a very fair price, $100 a year. Happy to hear that.

I'm happy to part with $100 worth of SATs to have better censorship resistance and privacy as I peruse the web. But you mentioned legislation earlier. That's actually something, probably a very important topic that i imagine was discussed heavily at the conference you attended this week what i mean obviously vpns are a bit of a renegade on the internet providing people with services that governments don't want them to have what is the regulatory landscape or the nation-state attack landscape on the industry looking like

yeah that's that's uh that's interesting i mean just generally the short answer is there's no legislation so there's kind of like a free free for all um in this sense i mean specifically in the u.s um the most legislation that's already happening and uh and that's the focus that talks about that is more about uh like uh india yeah so in in in some areas yeah so so you um so in in in areas like um um india and uh of course china uh iran pakistan and some other places it's just like completely um there's there's a spectrum but on one end of the spectrum you have the complete ban you cannot use a vpn if you use a vpn that's that's crime you will be put into jail and stuff like that there's some legislation where they where they try to like stop the use with like

uh in like smarter ways which is the indian uh where they where the the the data centers that provide vpn service they have to log so you can use it but you know it completely takes away the the reason for it and yeah in the western parts it's it's more about uh consumer protection but you know for for you know for example if if if you talk about the us um it's not in the best interest of government entities to stop vpns uh because a lot of people use vpn services that can be i mean so generally it's not good for them because it's it's it's encrypts the traffic um but you know if they run some of the services or they compromise some of the services then it's give you the assurance to do everything that you think is hidden from them

you know get that false sense of security and then they can use the data against you yeah it's a little bit of a game theory thing going on there yeah yeah we were talking about it yesterday with some of the the bitcoiners in the comments particularly those who have run businesses in the space and they think it's a crucial operational security aspect to their businesses like being able to access very sensitive client data should be put behind a company-wide vpn that that outsiders should not be able to get into definitely but yeah in the us um i know that some senators were raising concerns about the the vpn um like the promising and um um anonymity and all that kind of stuff so yeah and some of the players are trying to

put together some like coalitions and stuff like that that uh that's completely what they're doing and for different reasons but like i see that the big players a little bit concerned about regulation trying to show that they are self-regulating that can stop like that we have that in bitcoin too particularly bitcoin mining the bitcoin mining council we're We're self-regulating, we're all using green energy. Okay. Stop it. All right. I don't like self-regulating. Well. Similar concept there.

Self-reg, I don't like self-regulating to appease the government. Exactly, exactly. So just like mostly just posturing. And if you look deeper, so there's, if you go on the website that they run this with the Express Nord VPN, like they list a couple of things.

And if you check the actual, but what they promise that they won't do and what they will do. And if you check the providers and you go deeper like 50 minutes you can find five things that they violate in their own chords and stuff like that so it's just like completely meaningless it's all obfuscated yeah exactly not a fan of that either neither am i we need good actors like ivpn in the space i think you're a good actor happy to hear that you're not a spook are you well i probably wouldn't be sitting here

where would you yeah i mean uh let's say uh if i'm a spook i mean at some point i would either have to uh disappear or it would come out that i'm a spook that that would be really bad uh i'm a family man so i am too no it's funny i know matt told me he asked you yeah straight up i yeah i met him in amsterdam and i was like okay hi i'm from avp i really like your work and all that stuff and it was like oh yeah i like your project are you logging you know just looking at me just like you're not logging are you are you rock pulling us and i'm like okay no i wouldn't be here otherwise so you know no i don't think you're a spook or that you guys are locking but again trust is a spectrum definitely you have to meet these people in person and

you seem like a great guy family guy interested in bitcoin on the cutting edge of all the technologies seem to be in it yeah happy to happy that you you've made that that assessment from the time that we spent together so i appreciate it yeah what um what else should we tell the freaks before we wrap up here any final thoughts on ivpn the nature of vpns privacy censorship of the digital age like i think obviously the big theme of rabbit hole recap in this podcast is that governments have gone crazy they do not care about your privacy they do not care about you they want to control you and in the digital age particularly on the internet a lot of that control can be garnered by knowing what websites you're going to what you're doing what your ip is and

tools like vpns if you can trust them are a good way to protect against the government's trying to can control you oh that's right and just want to add I mean what I usually say is like stuff that's happening there was some conversations about this of course uh in uh China and some other other areas that's a blueprint for for other countries they're exporting the technology they're exporting the rhetoric they're the everything else you know it might not happen in the U.S in the next two years or three but they are very successful in in the complete control and domination of your lives and uh tracking everything and listing and like like like asserting those controls through the money flows and through the digital information and uh there's a blueprint is out there and like

the if we let these things happen that is happening right now around us and we and we don't fight against that we're just gonna slide down on that on that um slippery slope and we'll end up in some sort of uh similar dystopia uh in our western democracies so uh yeah just be vigilant no i'm very happy you said that like that's one thing i really want to get to you freaks if you just are listening or have been listening for a while that you have power you have agency you have the ability to make a decision do you let the government simply overpower you and take over control of your life or do you fight back by using tools like a vpn provider like tor like bitcoin like the lightning network potentially chummy immense to fight back or do you sit there

and cower and say oh they're too powerful they have too many guns they have the military they have all this money stop that stop that the government's at the other this is the completely convoluted point we found ourselves in human history where these governments particularly here in the united states where we were republic a union of states and the federal government was supposed to have very little power and they were supposed to represent us and it has become blatantly obvious in 2023 that they did not represent us they do not care about us and they think they have power over us at the end of the day you have power they're supposed to represent you and if they're not doing that you're not able to change they're encroaching control over your

life via the political apparatus you have to use the tools that live outside of that system that give you that power back so well said thank you for building ivpn evangelizing censorship resistance and and privacy on the web appreciate it appreciate you where can we find out more about ivpn yeah uh the cleanest way uh is ivpn.net is our uh is our uh website and yeah we are active on social platforms i would highlight master on i guess uh i've checked out those uh no sir right it's pronounced many different ways okay that's that's why i'm tripping up on it so yeah but we we we are not active there but uh we'll we'll look into that well okay ivpn.net i'm telling you from an onboarding experience if you pay over lightning

you can go from typing ivpn into your browser to having ivpn up and running within five minutes that's right it's pretty seamless onboarding process yeah victor thank you for stopping by on your trip thank you for this opportunity really enjoyed our conversation so i did as well When a lot of places I wasn't expecting, but I'm happy they did. All right. Excellent. All right. That's all we got today, freaks.

Peace and love. Tiki.