Decentralized VPNs and Routing networks

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There were a few threads about this on the previous forums, I’m wondering what experiences people have had with these tools.

There seems to be two main kinds of networks, those which are self contained (can only access things on that network, a bit like .onion, .i2p etc and those which aren’t, and are essentially crowd sourced VPNs.

With the latter I think there are some trust related issues this article points out Comparing dVPNs and centralized VPNs for privacy protection .

Self contained

Open

I think the two major obstacles:

  • Self contained: What is actually on there that you want to access?
  • Open: Should you trust the node to not be logging, are there enough of them?
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Honestly, most of these networks seem to be over promising tor ripoffs with a blockchain attached to sell some new shitcoins.

There is no reason why a network would need an inefficient database, which is what a blockchain basically boils down to.

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the entire idea of using blockchain for privacy is quite ridiculous. The concept of blockchain is that you cannot remove data. Well great.

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A post was split to a new topic: Portmaster Unlimited/Safing Privacy Network

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Hey David, cool to have you here. I would suggest to put this in a new thread so it can be discussed individually. You definitely are building something that I believe is not on just my eye. Definitely worth to talk about and ask more questions etc.

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Has the field reached a stage where it has matured to be used instead of a traditional vpn?

From my understanding in simple terms, they combine both the benefits of TOR & a traditional VPN

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Decentralization does not improve security: there may be government servers on the other end of the line that can be used for attacks.

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You can’t trust them.

With most VPNs, all you’re doing is routing your connection to some company’s virtual server they hosted on a major corporation’s VPS. The “VPN Provider” may genuinely “not keep logs”, but the VPS hoster still will happily cough up netflow data to de anonymize its users when asked. dVPNs that simply route your connection through VPSes that are incentivized by crypto don’t solve this issue.

Routing your connection through users’ networks and bandwith sharing like i2p or Tor + Snowflake is a better implementation than trying to use a shitcoin to incentivize users to spin up nodes on privacy-hostile hosting providers.