I have not visited this forum or used bitcoin for a few months and I am very pleased to see some real progress. Now the Wikipedia article looks very respectable and bitcoin is mentioned every day by respected sources.

Today I have reinstalled bitcoin on my current PC, restored my walled and made my first real transactions in Bitcoin: a donation to the EFF and an one year subscription to the Mullvad (https://www.mullvad.net/en/) VPN (very easy to use, accept payment in Bitcoin, recommended).

I look forward to participating in the development of the Bitcoin economy!

I have the same impression. But of course this and other privacy services could be honeypots. They also offer to download the client in source code, and I assume the source code has been checked, but the vast majority of users will just download the binary, and there is no way to tell whether it has been generated by the same source.

I am not saying that this is the case for Mullvad. But if privacy and crypto take off again, and if Bitcoin takes off, all security and regulatory agencies will be there, and there will be lots of traps and honeypots.

I reviewed the source and it's standard OpenVPN.

The risk, as I see it, is they are actually keeping logs - contrary to what they say. While unlikely, it is possible - so feel free to use rotating proxies or a different connection first, multiple layers are always better than one.

but +1 here as well. Need more of these in govt-friendly jurisdictions.

No, I meant they CAN. I think it's very unlikely they are keeping logs. But there is no way to know for sure.