7 ms·

A bit off topic, but this sort of transparency is why I don't mind paying $6 / mo for a vpn when mullvad's competitors are much cheaper. Their wireguard suppor

A bit off topic, but this sort of transparency is why I don't mind paying $6 / mo for a vpn when mullvad's competitors are much cheaper. Their wireguard support is great, and their speeds are much faster than what I got through openVpn on pia.

Aaronstotle 6y ago
Also a huge fan of paying with BTC and their use of account ids instead of emails, wish they would accept XMR also.
- speedgoose 6y ago
  Did you consider the average pollution of bitcoin transactions?
  - jdc 6y ago
    Do you have a number for us?
    - CameronNemo 6y ago
      cleancoins.io
  - smartbit 6y ago
    Good question. OTOH, did anyone ever consider the average pollution of the banking system? 10.000th of banks, 200+ central banks, BIS, IMF, ECB, etc, etc. Millions of employees, millions of desktops & servers, day-in-day out. Anyone with a link to a guestimate?
    - roywiggins 6y ago
      There's no way that a single $6 credit card transaction uses as much energy as sending $6 worth of bitcoin, which is the relevant measure.
      - monadic2 6y ago
        Yea but a whole fraud department of humans emits a ton of carbon. There's no way the banking and finance industry doesn't compete emissions wise with bitcoin.
        roywiggins 6y ago
        Fraud departments provide a pretty useful service to consumers. The existing finance system is so much larger than the Bitcoin economy that it's no surprise if they, in total, rival Bitcoin in energy intensity. It processes orders of magnitude more transactions and provides other services that people use that have no Bitcoin equivalents. This isn't a defense of the modern financial system, which is arguably a trash fire for plenty of reasons, but of course it's fairly energy intensive. It's massive. If it were replaced entirely by Bitcoin, it would be even more intensive.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        Barrin92 6y ago
        >There's no way the banking and finance industry doesn't compete emissions wise with bitcoin not on a per transaction basis, which is the only relevant measure because the banking system supports a lot more people than bitcoin does. A single bitcoin transaction uses 610.20 kWh right now, which is comparable to the energy consumption of an average US household over 20 days.[1] Also for a comparison of scope, Tenpay, Tencents payment service processes about 1.2 billion transactions per day, Bitcoin does about 300k. If all financial transactions conducted in China alone would consume the amount of energy that a bitcoin transaction does, it would roughly eclipse the energy the country consumes in a year, in one day. [1]https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
        6y ago
    - foepys 6y ago
      The Bitcoin network allegedly uses the amount of energy as the whole country of Denmark. This includes heavy industries like aluminum smelting that more or less use as much power as they are allowed to. A Bitcoin transaction uses about 1,005 kWh, while 100,000 VISA transactions use 169 kWh, according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...
      - kenforthewin 6y ago
        Unclear what goes into calculating the visa transactions. Is it just the literal cost of sending the bits over the wire? Does it include the cost of servers, man-power, real estate, etc?
        rcxdude 6y ago
        It's basically the cost of Visa running divided by the number of transactions they do. So yes it includes everything. You don't need to play silly tricks like that to make Bitcoin look bad. Bitcoin uses similar or more energy than the banking system while processing vastly fewer transactions. Somehow people can't comprehend how ridiculously inefficient bitcoin transactions are.
        nybble41 6y ago
        It's the inflation that's expensive, not the transaction processing. The threshold for economical power use in bitcoin mining scales in proportion to the block reward, not block size or number of transactions. Since the rate of inflation decreases exponentially (the block reward in BTC halves every four years) this issue will eventually resolve itself.
        p1necone 6y ago
        According to the numbers above a bitcoin transaction is currently 591715 times as expensive (in kwh) as a visa transaction. If a transaction costs half as much power every 4 years that's only 193 years until it's cheaper than visa[0]! Truly the financial instrument of the (distant) future! [0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x%5E2+%3D+%281005%2F%28169%2F100000%29%29%2C+x%2F4 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x%5E2+%3D+%281005%2F%2...
    - davidgerard 6y ago
      Yes, they did! Note that, like you, 0 bitcoiners who have ever raised this objection put a number in. * Bitcoin: 0.1% of all electricity, 7 transactions per second. * THE ENTIRE REST OF CIVILISATION, FINANCIAL SYSTEM AND ALL: 99.9% of electricity, a heck of a lot more than 6,993 transactions per second.
    - wing-_-nuts 6y ago
      I personally can't wait until most crypto currencies move to proof of stake over proof of work. I wish the UN would coordinate some sort of global carbon tax initiative. Want to mine crypto? Ok, but you're paying for the co2. No more free rides!
ss3000 6y ago
I love everything about Mullvad except their device limit, which is unfortunately a deal breaker for me. 5 is completely inadequate for my use cases.
- chmod775 6y ago
  Mullvad uses the superior way of not having a real account at all - you just get a number you can "deposit" money into. It's the only way they can reliably prevent abuse like a thousand people using one number - because this way you can just track the number of open connections per account number. This is superior to tracking IP-addresses to detect fraud for obvious privacy reasons. I do a similar thing for a service I run. Out of curiosity, how do you even manage to use more than five devices for private use at once? Even just owning that many is unlikely.
  - ss3000 6y ago
    As much as I appreciate Mullvad's stance around privacy, I don't actually use a VPN for privacy (I use Tor for that), but mostly for bypassing geo-restrictions on my entertainment devices for games and streaming services and whatnot. For that use case, I can't justify paying double/triple the price as other providers that offer 2/3x the devices for the same price. The provider I use now, Surfshark, offers unlimited devices for about 1/3 of the price, and also recently started offering WireGuard, it would be financially irresponsible for me to choose Mullvad which would effectively 10x what I'm paying right now for the same number of devices. FWIW I understand that their account number mechanism is superior from a privacy perspective, and that there's no way to support unlimited devices while combating fraud using that mechanism. It's just not the right set of tradeoffs for my use case.
  - jsjohnst 6y ago
    > Out of curiosity, how do you even manage to use more than five devices for private use at once? Even just owning that many is unlikely. I’m not GP and I certainly don’t take GP’s stance about limiting to 5 devices (I think it makes sense), but claiming it’s unlikely that someone owns more than five devices is silly, especially if someone has a family. My non-tech sister’s family of four has two phones, three iPads, two laptops, etc. As another example, I literally own over an order of magnitude more devices than just five devices for private use (yes, I’m an outlier).
logical_person 6y ago
very strange shilling considering mullvad doesn't know how the windows networking stack works and this bug exposes them as such. edit: to be clear, it's the responsibility of a VPN provider to fully understand the platform they're selling a VPN solution for. the fact that a virtual machines on windows do not use the host's NDIS stack/firewall is well-known.
- jefftk 6y ago
  Speaking positively of a company is not in itself shilling.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dymax78 6y ago
I vehemently agree with your position. It's also worth mentioning (albeit anecdotal) their prompt and verbose support when/if necessary.

Aaronstotle 6y ago

Also a huge fan of paying with BTC and their use of account ids instead of emails, wish they would accept XMR also.

speedgoose 6y ago
Did you consider the average pollution of bitcoin transactions?
- jdc 6y ago
  Do you have a number for us?
  - CameronNemo 6y ago
    cleancoins.io
- smartbit 6y ago
  Good question. OTOH, did anyone ever consider the average pollution of the banking system? 10.000th of banks, 200+ central banks, BIS, IMF, ECB, etc, etc. Millions of employees, millions of desktops & servers, day-in-day out. Anyone with a link to a guestimate?
  - roywiggins 6y ago
    There's no way that a single $6 credit card transaction uses as much energy as sending $6 worth of bitcoin, which is the relevant measure.
    - monadic2 6y ago
      Yea but a whole fraud department of humans emits a ton of carbon. There's no way the banking and finance industry doesn't compete emissions wise with bitcoin.
      - roywiggins 6y ago
        Fraud departments provide a pretty useful service to consumers. The existing finance system is so much larger than the Bitcoin economy that it's no surprise if they, in total, rival Bitcoin in energy intensity. It processes orders of magnitude more transactions and provides other services that people use that have no Bitcoin equivalents. This isn't a defense of the modern financial system, which is arguably a trash fire for plenty of reasons, but of course it's fairly energy intensive. It's massive. If it were replaced entirely by Bitcoin, it would be even more intensive.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - Barrin92 6y ago
        >There's no way the banking and finance industry doesn't compete emissions wise with bitcoin not on a per transaction basis, which is the only relevant measure because the banking system supports a lot more people than bitcoin does. A single bitcoin transaction uses 610.20 kWh right now, which is comparable to the energy consumption of an average US household over 20 days.[1] Also for a comparison of scope, Tenpay, Tencents payment service processes about 1.2 billion transactions per day, Bitcoin does about 300k. If all financial transactions conducted in China alone would consume the amount of energy that a bitcoin transaction does, it would roughly eclipse the energy the country consumes in a year, in one day. [1]https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
        6y ago
  - foepys 6y ago
    The Bitcoin network allegedly uses the amount of energy as the whole country of Denmark. This includes heavy industries like aluminum smelting that more or less use as much power as they are allowed to. A Bitcoin transaction uses about 1,005 kWh, while 100,000 VISA transactions use 169 kWh, according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...
    - kenforthewin 6y ago
      Unclear what goes into calculating the visa transactions. Is it just the literal cost of sending the bits over the wire? Does it include the cost of servers, man-power, real estate, etc?
      - rcxdude 6y ago
        It's basically the cost of Visa running divided by the number of transactions they do. So yes it includes everything. You don't need to play silly tricks like that to make Bitcoin look bad. Bitcoin uses similar or more energy than the banking system while processing vastly fewer transactions. Somehow people can't comprehend how ridiculously inefficient bitcoin transactions are.
        nybble41 6y ago
        It's the inflation that's expensive, not the transaction processing. The threshold for economical power use in bitcoin mining scales in proportion to the block reward, not block size or number of transactions. Since the rate of inflation decreases exponentially (the block reward in BTC halves every four years) this issue will eventually resolve itself.
        p1necone 6y ago
        According to the numbers above a bitcoin transaction is currently 591715 times as expensive (in kwh) as a visa transaction. If a transaction costs half as much power every 4 years that's only 193 years until it's cheaper than visa[0]! Truly the financial instrument of the (distant) future! [0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x%5E2+%3D+%281005%2F%28169%2F100000%29%29%2C+x%2F4 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x%5E2+%3D+%281005%2F%2...
  - davidgerard 6y ago
    Yes, they did! Note that, like you, 0 bitcoiners who have ever raised this objection put a number in. * Bitcoin: 0.1% of all electricity, 7 transactions per second. * THE ENTIRE REST OF CIVILISATION, FINANCIAL SYSTEM AND ALL: 99.9% of electricity, a heck of a lot more than 6,993 transactions per second.
  - wing-_-nuts 6y ago
    I personally can't wait until most crypto currencies move to proof of stake over proof of work. I wish the UN would coordinate some sort of global carbon tax initiative. Want to mine crypto? Ok, but you're paying for the co2. No more free rides!

ss3000 6y ago

I love everything about Mullvad except their device limit, which is unfortunately a deal breaker for me. 5 is completely inadequate for my use cases.

chmod775 6y ago
Mullvad uses the superior way of not having a real account at all - you just get a number you can "deposit" money into. It's the only way they can reliably prevent abuse like a thousand people using one number - because this way you can just track the number of open connections per account number. This is superior to tracking IP-addresses to detect fraud for obvious privacy reasons. I do a similar thing for a service I run. Out of curiosity, how do you even manage to use more than five devices for private use at once? Even just owning that many is unlikely.
- ss3000 6y ago
  As much as I appreciate Mullvad's stance around privacy, I don't actually use a VPN for privacy (I use Tor for that), but mostly for bypassing geo-restrictions on my entertainment devices for games and streaming services and whatnot. For that use case, I can't justify paying double/triple the price as other providers that offer 2/3x the devices for the same price. The provider I use now, Surfshark, offers unlimited devices for about 1/3 of the price, and also recently started offering WireGuard, it would be financially irresponsible for me to choose Mullvad which would effectively 10x what I'm paying right now for the same number of devices. FWIW I understand that their account number mechanism is superior from a privacy perspective, and that there's no way to support unlimited devices while combating fraud using that mechanism. It's just not the right set of tradeoffs for my use case.
- jsjohnst 6y ago
  > Out of curiosity, how do you even manage to use more than five devices for private use at once? Even just owning that many is unlikely. I’m not GP and I certainly don’t take GP’s stance about limiting to 5 devices (I think it makes sense), but claiming it’s unlikely that someone owns more than five devices is silly, especially if someone has a family. My non-tech sister’s family of four has two phones, three iPads, two laptops, etc. As another example, I literally own over an order of magnitude more devices than just five devices for private use (yes, I’m an outlier).

logical_person 6y ago

very strange shilling considering mullvad doesn't know how the windows networking stack works and this bug exposes them as such. edit: to be clear, it's the responsibility of a VPN provider to fully understand the platform they're selling a VPN solution for. the fact that a virtual machines on windows do not use the host's NDIS stack/firewall is well-known.

jefftk 6y ago
Speaking positively of a company is not in itself shilling.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dymax78 6y ago

I vehemently agree with your position. It's also worth mentioning (albeit anecdotal) their prompt and verbose support when/if necessary.