Mullvad VPN top-ups using Lightning

[mk4]

For those who don't know, Mullvad[1] is a VPN where you absolutely don't need to provide any personal information to be able to use their service; instead, you create an "account" just by generating an account number. And you can pay with bitcoin! Speeds are quite fine based on my experience, but the app is quite lacking in the features side compared to more mainstream VPNs. That, and monthly price is a flat €5 with no discounts. A bit more expensive than most VPNs, but you're pretty much paying for the privacy.

Now, I found out on Twitter[2] that apparently this dude named Carl Dong created some sort of service that can allow you to top up your Mullvad subscription using Lightning, and feedback seems to be pretty good.



Check it out here: https://vpn.sovereign.engineering/

^ Probably one of the best ways to test out using Lightning since not everyone is interested in gift cards and such.

[1] https://mullvad.net/en/
[2] https://twitter.com/raw_avocado/status/1460289529529708558

[mk4]

1. Is it official service provided by Mullvad or 3rd party service?
2. Have you tried using this service?
3. While it's cool way to promote LN usage, some people like me would rather use on-chain transaction since we rarely make Bitcoin transaction.

Which payment methods do you accept?

We accept cash, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, bank wire, credit card, PayPal, Swish, Giropay, Eps transfer, Bancontact, iDEAL, and Przelewy24. With credit card and PayPal, you have the option to set up a monthly recurring subscription.

1. It's obviously a 3rd party service as it was made by some Chaincode Labs dude. His profile is tagged on the tweet.
2. Mullvad? Yes. Carl Dong's service? Nope.
3. I've mentioned that you can use bitcoin:

For those who don't know, Mullvad[1] is a VPN where you absolutely don't need to provide any personal information to be able to use their service; instead, you create an "account" just by generating an account number. And you can pay with bitcoin! Speeds are quite fine based on my experience, but the app is quite lacking in the features side compared to more mainstream VPNs. That, and monthly price is a flat €5 with no discounts. A bit more expensive than most VPNs, but you're pretty much paying for the privacy.

[dkbit98]

You can find some useful stuff following Alex Waltz on twitter 
Great use case for Lightning payments, but I am not sure if we can really trust any VPNs especially if they are located in Five, Nine Eyes, or 14 Eyes countries.
Mullvad office is in Gothenburg, Sweden that is one of 14 Eyes country, and I never tried their service but they have open source clients, and they are giving 10% discount for Bitcoin payments to start with.
I don't expect perfect protection from any VPN, but they are useful tool in todays world, and it's essential if you live in China or other countries with tyrannical regimes.

[mk4]

You can find some useful stuff following Alex Waltz on twitter 
Great use case for Lightning payments, but I am not sure if we can really trust any VPNs especially if they are located in Five, Nine Eyes, or 14 Eyes countries.
Mullvad office is in Gothenburg, Sweden that is one of 14 Eyes country, and I never tried their service but they have open source clients, and they are giving 10% discount for Bitcoin payments to start with.
I don't expect perfect protection from any VPN, but they are useful tool in todays world, and it's essential if you live in China or other countries with tyrannical regimes.

Yep! VPNs don't provide the best privacy(Tor is probably still the best, in exchange for really slow speeds), but it's going to depend on who you're trying to hide from. Should be a great service if you just don't want your ISP snooping on your stuff.

[dkbit98]

Yep! VPNs don't provide the best privacy(Tor is probably still the best, in exchange for really slow speeds), but it's going to depend on who you're trying to hide from. Should be a great service if you just don't want your ISP snooping on your stuff.

Exactly, let's make life a bit harder for our governments and ISPs using every possible privacy tools we can.

One more thing I found is that you can also pay with Lightning for some other VPN providers like Surfshark and Torguard using payment processor Coingate.com,
but I think you need to submit them email address and other personal data for registration.
On positive side, they are much cheaper than Mullvad and you can catch some discount deals.

[mk4]

I just checked option to buy voucher without login and noticed price difference,
1. On https://vpn.sovereign.engineering/account?is_hidden=dummyyes, the price is "12 months for $55.00 ($4.58 per month)"
2. On mullvad website, the price is flat 5 EUR which means 12 months costs 60 EUR (or 68.51 USD).

I wonder if @carl_dong simply write wrong amount.

I'm guessing it's probably because both services are pulling current BTC prices from different APIs. No idea where because Carl Dong's service isn't open-source, but yea shouldn't really be a problem because it's accessible on Tor anyway.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Mullvad offer a 10% discount for paying in bitcoin. So €4.50 equivalent in BTC per month, or €54 per year. A 12 month coupon for $55 works out to around €48 though, so there is still a discrepancy, but not quite as big as ETF has outlined.

but the app is quite lacking in the features side compared to more mainstream VPNs.

They have config generators for both WireGuard and OpenVPN on their website, so you can connect through them and use the full feature set they come with instead if you want:

https://mullvad.net/en/account/#/wireguard-config/
https://mullvad.net/en/account/#/openvpn-config/

[Synchronice]

That, and monthly price is a flat €5 with no discounts. A bit more expensive than most VPNs, but you're pretty much paying for the privacy.

It's one of the cheapest monthly VPN and sometimes this is an option for those who can't afford one-time yearly subscriptions where it gets really as low as $2.

Mullvad office is in Gothenburg, Sweden that is one of 14 Eyes country, and I never tried their service but they have open source clients, and they are giving 10% discount for Bitcoin payments to start with.
I don't expect perfect protection from any VPN, but they are useful tool in todays world, and it's essential if you live in China or other countries with tyrannical regimes.

To my mind, Mullvad is one of the best VPN for those who value privacy.
It offers:
Easiest account setup and access process
Very simple and easy interface
€5/month and 30 days money-back guarantee.

VPNs don't provide the best privacy(Tor is probably still the best, in exchange for really slow speeds), but it's going to depend on who you're trying to hide from. Should be a great service if you just don't want your ISP snooping on your stuff.

Everyone should approach the security and privacy they need. There are types of people who use VPN to hide traces while doing the basic internet stuff. But, there are types of people who do something prohibited (phishing, social engineering, scamming, trading with illegal items) and they need to use more complicated tools and methods to improve their security rather than VPN alone.
With VPN, I feel more self-confident, independent and proud.

[mk4]

Mullvad offer a 10% discount for paying in bitcoin. So €4.50 equivalent in BTC per month, or €54 per year. A 12 month coupon for $55 works out to around €48 though, so there is still a discrepancy, but not quite as big as ETF has outlined.

I actually forgot about this. What I remember in the past when I paid with bitcoin is that every 1mo purchase I did pretty much amounted to around €4.85-€5 ish(excluding transaction fees) hence why I've always remembered it as a flat €5 price lol.

[hugeblack]

Does other well-known VPNs only accept bitcoin using mainnet or you can pay using LN? I haven't bought VPN in a while, but I think it's perfect for anyone who wants to buy short-term subscriptions as a day or a week.
Anyway is mullvad VPN is a good one? It is the first time that I know about this service

[vv181]

Anyway is mullvad VPN is a good one? It is the first time that I know about this service

I do personally use Mullvad, and so far so good. I really like their features and the flexibilities they've given. I know the service from privacytools.io(Due to some drama they now have 2 separate websites: PrivacyGuides). On both sites, you can see Mullvad is one of the recommended VPN services, which are only listed after it met with strict specific criteria.

[mk4]

Does other well-known VPNs only accept bitcoin using mainnet or you can pay using LN? I haven't bought VPN in a while, but I think it's perfect for anyone who wants to buy short-term subscriptions as a day or a week.

I actually don't know a single VPN service that accepts LN transactions; including this one as the top-up service is a sort of middleman.

Anyway is mullvad VPN is a good one? It is the first time that I know about this service

Probably the best when talking about privacy. Debatable when talking about speed, features, etc. Based on my experience speed is pretty close to mainstream VPN services tho.

[LoyceV]

Check it out here: https://vpn.sovereign.engineering/

Minimum payment: 6 months. I hope Mullvad will soon add LN payments directly. Until then: if you want to try Mullvad with LN-payment without subscribing for 6 months: convert $1 worth of LN through fixedfloat.com to BCH (not promoting the shitcoin here) and pay it to Mullvad. That gets you almost 6 days of VPN usage.

While it's cool way to promote LN usage, some people like me would rather use on-chain transaction since we rarely make Bitcoin transaction.

In that case: try to combine payments: if you top up your VPN when you're making another payment anyway, it only adds a few bytes to the transaction size. This reduces your total fee and prevents unnecessary blockchain growth.

I wonder if @carl_dong simply write wrong amount.

See:

You can also buy from resellers that offer Mullvad VPN at different price models than ours.

I remember the days I paid about 0.001BTC for one or only a few days VPN usage. That gets you almost a full year now!

[dkbit98]

I actually don't know a single VPN service that accepts LN transactions; including this one as the top-up service is a sort of middleman.

I think that TorGuard and Surfshark VPN are accepting LN payments via Coingate option, but email address and other information is required for registration.
TorGuard even has their own active Lightning node running for years:
https://1ml.com/node/03557fd11b58cb93d2ad4fab4dd4cff7462a97e21e8f6b7a712cb8bd27a96b9eef

BCH (not promoting the shitcoin here) and pay it to Mullvad.

Oh, I thought I saw some bch-blasphemy written from you but you have fast fingers 

[LoyceV]

BCH (not promoting the shitcoin here) and pay it to Mullvad.

Oh, I thought I saw some bch-blasphemy written from you but you have fast fingers  

You could follow the same route sending LN to Fixedfloat, converting it to Bitcoin and then sending it to Mullvad. You'll pay about $1.50 (still not that bad) for just under 6 days of VPN usage. But it doesn't feel right to use LN to still create an on-chain Bitcoin transaction and then wait for a confirmation before you can use the VPN.

I don't particularly like forkcoins or other shitcoins, but they serve a purpose until LN is more widely accepted. Just like I sometimes use a shitcoin to withdraw a small amount from an exchange to avoid their ridiculous Bitcoin withdrawal fee.

[Saint-loup]

Check it out here: https://vpn.sovereign.engineering/

Minimum payment: 6 months. I hope Mullvad will soon add LN payments directly. Until then: if you want to try Mullvad with LN-payment without subscribing for 6 months: convert $1 worth of LN through fixedfloat.com to BCH (not promoting the shitcoin here) and pay it to Mullvad. That gets you almost 6 days of VPN usage.

This (third party) service seems now to offer Lightning payments for 1 month subscriptions by directly topping up the account or by selling voucher codes. But not less than that amount of time unfortunately, that's sad but users still need to use BCH if they need to feed their account instantly with smaller amounts.

[LoyceV]

This (third party) service seems now to offer Lightning payments for 1 month subscriptions by directly topping up the account or by selling voucher codes. But not less than that amount of time unfortunately, that's sad but users still need to use BCH if they need to feed their account instantly with smaller amounts.

I've seen the reseller, but never used it. If you don't like Forkcoins, use Monero. Or just use Bitcoin, you'll have to wait for a confirmation, but small amounts are accepted. It may be a good option to get rid of small change: instead of sending 0.0001 Bitcoin back to your wallet, use it to get 2 weeks VPN!
Or, if you really want to use Bitcoin LN, send it through an instant exchanger. Some of them exchange small amounts, CoinPlaza.it for instance has a 3300 sat minimum when depositing LN. Convert that to the Forkcoin and you'll get 4 days VPN.

[dkbit98]

This (third party) service seems now to offer Lightning payments for 1 month subscriptions by directly topping up the account or by selling voucher codes. But not less than that amount of time unfortunately, that's sad but users still need to use BCH if they need to feed their account instantly with smaller amounts.

How can this offer be slightly cheaper than official Mullvad VPN that costs the same for one month, one years and one decade?
I never tried paying like this but I might give it a test run next month and see how is speed compared to other providers.
Mullvad is probably the best option if you don't want to give them any personal information, but it's still located in Sweden, one of the Fourteen Eyes country.

[LoyceV]

How can this offer be slightly cheaper than official Mullvad VPN that costs the same for one month, one years and one decade?

Bulk discount, I guess.

I never tried paying like this but I might give it a test run next month and see how is speed compared to other providers.

My own internet speed is the limiting factor with Mullvad.

[Saint-loup]

This (third party) service seems now to offer Lightning payments for 1 month subscriptions by directly topping up the account or by selling voucher codes. But not less than that amount of time unfortunately, that's sad but users still need to use BCH if they need to feed their account instantly with smaller amounts.

I've seen the reseller, but never used it. If you don't like Forkcoins, use Monero. Or just use Bitcoin, you'll have to wait for a confirmation, but small amounts are accepted. It may be a good option to get rid of small change: instead of sending 0.0001 Bitcoin back to your wallet, use it to get 2 weeks VPN!
Or, if you really want to use Bitcoin LN, send it through an instant exchanger. Some of them exchange small amounts, CoinPlaza.it for instance has a 3300 sat minimum when depositing LN. Convert that to the Forkcoin and you'll get 4 days VPN.

If Coinplaza really sends quickly BCH I think I will try to use this solution next time or I will try to manage bch with Trustwallet on a smartphone, even if it bores me to have to care of a balance just for that.  

How can this offer be slightly cheaper than official Mullvad VPN that costs the same for one month, one years and one decade?
I never tried paying like this but I might give it a test run next month and see how is speed compared to other providers.
Mullvad is probably the best option if you don't want to give them any personal information, but it's still located in Sweden, one of the Fourteen Eyes country.

Nowadays almost all websites use HTTPS, so VPN providers don't see what you are doing except the URLs you are visiting as your ISP when you are not using a vpn. But if you use DNS-over-HTTPS protocol in your browser it won't see them anymore.