Q: I'm NOT using Linux.

Why should I use Simplified Privacy's VPN, if I can't use the Linux fingerprint app HydraVeil?

A: First of all, as newer VPN provider, we have less restricted IP addresses, which means you can sign-up and use more services with less hassle. Often Reddit, Google accounts, Google captchas, Cloudflare, Telegram sign-ups, and many other services will give you a far more difficult experience if you're using an IP address that someone else did abusive behavior from.

Second, we focus on smaller 1-country "decentralized" data centers, which offer far greater privacy. They only respond to a court order from their own country. And these providers are far more desperate for customers, which means they care to fight and resist anything that could compromise their reputation.

On the other hand... Mullvad, IVPN, and Proton all resell huge international providers which means that not only are the same providers seeing all traffic across multiple different VPNs, such as both sides of who you talk to on audio calls. But even worse, often the websites themselves will use these same datacenter providers, which is a direct conflict of interest. We outlined this in our past podcasts, articles, and videos. [1]

Another benefit of Simplified Privacy is the amazing pricing. You can take advantage of very cheap burner billing codes, with no information such as an email requested. For just $1 of XMR or Lightning zap, you get access to a location of your choice, which can be fast, easy, and convenient for many mobile users.

In fact, if you ever wanted to "be invisible", then this burner pricing opens the door for a huge amount of really interesting setups. For example, with other VPNs, they see both your home PC and also what you do on your phone. Then when you travel and use Wifi, they now know literally everything about you, such as who all your friends are.

This ties your personal interactions to your web traffic, which centralizes all knowledge about you. In fact, the VPN you're using now probably knows you better than anyone else in your life. While as with Simplified Privacy, you can effortlessly isolate pieces of your life in under a minute. To have one fast burner code for your PC, and another for the cellphone tower.

Another interesting setup is to put Simplified Privacy on an open source router. This empowers you to be anonymous to a different provider, but at an affordable price.

Yet another idea, is you could give a VPN code to family or friends with crappy opsec, so you're not on the same account as someone using Big-Tech NSA-friendly devices that see the code.

And finally, Simplified Privacy is more than just an IP address you route traffic through. But it's an educational agora community, of primarily volunteers who donate their time and energy. Without our contributors, such as coding, writing/creating content, and answering questions in chats, this organization would simply not exist.

While other VPNs such as Proton now come under pressure from Switzerland's government to give up data. Simplified Privacy is developing alternative parallel economy legal systems, such as PGP-binding contracts with XMRBazaar. With no bank accounts, we exist primarily on Nostr, and in your mind.

To quote my hero John Lennon,

"We can't help everyone, but everyone can help someone"

Ports are pretty locked down. Not a public server either. NixOS politics concern me too. Especially being one of the first community members to be exiled in the notorious purge on non woke members.

I am in the process of forking NixOS and starting a new distro project. It is a couple months out though from a viable beta testing release. It will be a soft fork that will be focused on a non-woke / politics free community. While working together on creating actual proper documentation. That I am hoping one day rivals the Arch Wiki as the gold standard.

Look into starting out with NixOS, enable flakes, and get started with determinant nix. They don't really play into the politics aspect of NixOS. They also offer commercial support too.

This repo is looking into on-chain payouts. Hashpool let's you have fun with ecash before the block is mined but users will still need to claim their bitcoin.

For a tiny bitaxe miner the user probably just wants to receive ecash or lightning payouts. For large miners, nothing beats self-custody.

🚨If you live in any of the following countries and have the ability to leave, take it. IMO, things are about to get very ugly.

🇦🇺 Australia

🇬🇧 UK

🇨🇦 Canada

CTV is required for non-custodial mining pools

I like Ark, but it has three characteristics that I don't like:

1. The server regularly creates and funds new ark multisigs, and must pass the cost of doing so onto users

2. Users regularly "refresh" their coins by exiting an expiring ark multisig and boarding into a new one, and they bear the cost of doing so plus the annoyance of needing to get online regularly to do it in an interactive group signing session

3. Users pay one another in "out of round" payments that are free to initiate but cost money to settle, which encourages users to keep the funds unsettled, which effectively transforms Ark into a statechain model

The two teams (x.com/ArkLabsHQ and x.com/2ndbtc) have spent a lot of time and money making these characteristics work and optimizing their software so that those pain points are as painless as possible. But my coinpool software eliminates all of those characteristics, so if they switched now, they'd have to throw away a lot of their work.

Still, I recommend they do. I think my model is better and I hope they take a closer look.

Whoopi Goldberg is shocked that Biden wasn’t fit for office… She says she never saw anything to point to him having health issues… she’s now outraged that the media didn’t tell her…

You literally can’t make this up

Hi Nostr,