{"id":621,"date":"2017-05-08T20:36:41","date_gmt":"2017-05-08T20:36:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/z303.org\/?p=621"},"modified":"2025-03-17T22:04:01","modified_gmt":"2025-03-17T22:04:01","slug":"mysterium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/?p=621","title":{"rendered":"Mysterium"},"content":{"rendered":"

A friend asked me if I’d heard about Mysterium Network<\/a>, decentralised VPN. I hadn’t, so took a look<\/p>\n

TL:DR<\/strong>
\nI don’t see what this gives you over paying for a ‘normal’ VPN with bitcoin.
\n<\/p>\n

Most of the information seems to be from a single press release<\/a> currently and a medium blog<\/a>. They seem to have been around since December 2016<\/a>. They seem to be active on their github repos<\/a>. The latest commit was only a day ago.<\/p>\n

On the Blockchain side, they use Ethereum<\/a> and the crowdsale contracts from OpenZepplin.<\/a> Only Presale.sol<\/a> has any content.<\/p>\n

On the VPN side, they seem to use OpenVPN<\/a>. A VPN only protects the data between you and the endpoint. The endpoint can still track your traffic. I don’t see any explanation of how they guarantee anonymity<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On the network level. The endpoint and the client need to send data to each other. This means they need to know each others IP addresses. From a quick look I can’t find them using onion<\/a> or garlic routing<\/a> to hide them from each other.<\/p>\n

Ethereum payments are not anonymous, wallets addresses are trackable using a block explorer<\/a>. Some current work is integrating zksnarks with Ethereum<\/a> to add anonymity. I haven’t looked in detail to understand if the transaction flow to see if you could link as client and an endpoint.<\/p>\n

As for being able to ‘rent their unused network bandwidth’. This seems problematic. Many home broadband contracts do not allow you to run a server. So you would be breaking your term of service. More worrying would being liable for what a client downloaded over your connection<\/a>.<\/p>\n

More discussion over on r\/Ethereum<\/a> which addresses many of these points in more detail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A friend asked me if I’d heard about Mysterium Network, decentralised VPN. I hadn’t, so took a look TL:DR I don’t see what this gives you over paying for a ‘normal’ VPN with bitcoin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_block_theme_hide_title":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","without-featured-image"],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Zoe","author_link":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/?author=1"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}