There’s one tracker blocked by Bravehttps://nym.com/monitoring?o=967446&p=4510941535993856&r=us on the pricing page and when you go to checkout there’s a stripe tracker https://r.stripe.com/b. Now that may be unavoidable for the stripe checkout, but people paying with crypto shouldn’t be subjected to it imo.
I know it’s a little thing but mullvad’s https://mullvad.net/en/account page does not have any trackers until you load up the credit card purchase page so there’s none when paying with crypto or cash.
They are increasing their prices so I was considering buying something but it just seems weird for a privacy-focused VPN to have so many trackers/third parties.
I used Trocador.app to pay with Monero which got converted to Nym tokens to get the discount so I didn’t have to install anything.
The VPN app is decent. Less polished than Mullvad but I haven’t experienced any bugs. It’s cool you can see server details.
I think the biggest thing Nym needs to work on is their marketing. Right now it seems too flowery and just doesn’t inspire confidence compared to mullvad.net or ivpn.net.
Mixnet mode is less than 1 Mbps in my experience.
dVPN is slower than Mullvad multihop but still usable.
The payments system is not as convenient as Mullvad’s ignoring the stripe issue. It doesn’t work without JS.
That’s a good point - we are moving payments in app with no cookies whatsoever next month. We can look into separating those after, that tracker is done because the credit card info is on same page as the crypto payment info, but I think overall moving it all in the app should also solve the issue! For example, in some countries our website is censored, but users can still get APK etc.
Hey - it’s a decentralized version of Chaumian access tokens (e-cash, and yes, you don’t need us to get Chaumian access tokens (i.e. zk-nyms). For the ambitious, you can try it here:
So you pay the smart contract directly in NYM token (we don’t care how you get them!) and then you get your zk-nym access token back. However, right now it’s a bit daunting for normal users, we hope to embed this whole flow in the NymVPN app soon so if you only need Nym for a few gigabytes you can just pay for that anonymously..
Nym SA is certainly not raising the price of the token. The token is given to the nodes, some via inflation as network capacity is MUCH larger than demand. That makes price lower if anything of NYM token. The NYM token price changes with supply and demand everyday, it’s out of our hands at this point.
It looks like Nym have moved over to their new pricing scheme now. I was hoping it’d have lasted until the end of the month for payday etc, as I was going to try out via the 2 year plan. The best you can get now is $3/mo paying in 6-month increments by paying with their Nym token.
Really poor move to say you’re moving to a new scheme “soon” but not providing a deadline, IMO.
@Expert4870 : apologies for the tag, but I wondered how you got on in the last week or so? How are you finding latency in particular on the regular mode (if you’ve measured it at all)?
The Android app is decent. Both Mac and Android apps work but aren’t as good as Mullvad’s. There are bugs I’ve noticed mainly in connecting. Once you’re on a good server it just works and on safest selection it seems to always work. For when you don’t want to pick a server there’s “safest” and “random”. It would be nice if “safest” mode is explained in the app.
And otherwise you can select countries, states, and specific servers.
The Mac app is significantly less good than Mullvad’s. I like how on Mullvad it’s just a menu bar item and the whole app is there–at least I’m used to it. It makes sense being in the menu bar being a utility so I don’t love how you get a whole window with Nym and then have to open it to see status.
I was just testing speed and it’s actually pretty similar to Mullvad multi-hop or even faster when I set everything within the same area. Only a few tests but yeah I have no problem with speed on dVPN mode.
Mixnet
Mixnet mode I don’t see the point of but maybe it’s a proof-of-concept. I get like 100 to 1000Kbps. The interesting thing is it’s a very different experience to being on a spotty network like a plane or cellular, for example. It’s a strong connection, just very very slow.
Most static or lightweight websites seem to take 3-6 seconds to load.
YouTube didn’t load in 30 seconds so i quit.
LinkedIn loaded in 15 seconds but a broken version without UI just like a brand new html site but with all the words.
The largest site on 512kb.club loads in 4 seconds and the lowest ones load in 1-2 seconds
If I manually select servers it seems to fail connecting a lot at least just now on my Mac but if I choose safest it works. It has pretty good auto-connect on Android but not as good as Mullvad because I’ve noticed Nym not connecting occasionally. I think the app is sound just certain servers fail completely. Just now I was trying to select a different exit server in the Mac app and it just wasn’t changing.
You don’t get all the DNS options Mullvad gives, you just get “Block ads”. No idea how well the adblock works because my browsers have it.
One big missing feature is “Lockdown mode” on Mac, which Mullvad has which blocks your computer from connecting to the internet when not on Mullvad, but I didn’t actually use that most of the time. On Android, the system handles preventing leaks (not very well, mind you, except on GrapheneOS) so the apps don’t have to implement their own kill switches.
Nym: just copy Mullvad’s app it’s open source.
For the price I’m pretty happy and nothing has made me want to ask for a refund (I don’t think I can get one anyway because of crypto payment).
I remember reading on here someone suggested you can get residential IPs on Nym and I did just notice that in the server info it says the IP type. All the ones i’ve noticed have been “Datacenter IP”. I’m curious about this as I see no filter option.
It’s really meant for stuff that can handle being slow. So, stuff like email or messaging. It’ll probably be more useful when they add support for selecting whether a specific app uses dVPN or mixnet mode (in the split tunneling options). I think that’s on their roadmap somewhere, but IDK when they’re going to actually implement it.
In my experience, the residential IPs have made no difference regarding sites blocking me/CAPTCHA. Sometimes they’re actually worse. Not sure if this is because they’re not actually residential IPs or if it’s because so many people are using those IPs that they get flagged as suspicious.
Thanks a lot for your response here. Have you tried doing any real-time gaming or anything that demands good latency over speed? When you say “same area” do you mean same country or just roughly the same geographic location (eg: DE → NL or something)?
For context: I currently have Mullvad set up 2x (once on my router, and then once on my PC), so a sort of bastardized double-hop. Latency is mostly fine, in local game servers I tend to get around a ~40-60ms latency bump (so we’re talking from ~10-20ms to anywhere from ~50-80ms) which I still find to be in a perfectly playable range.