[wing-_-nuts]

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]

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

[speedgoose]

Did you consider the average pollution of bitcoin transactions?

[smartbit]

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?

[foepys]

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-co...

[kenforthewin]

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]

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.

[roywiggins]

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]

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.

[Barrin92]

>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/

[roywiggins]

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.

[davidgerard]

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]

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!

[jdc]

Do you have a number for us?

[CameronNemo]

cleancoins.io

[ss3000]

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]

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]

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.

[bzbarsky]

It's easy enough to get to 5 devices, for a family. Especially given the current remote work/schooling situation. Figure 1 laptop or tablet per person (adults and kids) and 1 phone per adult. If you have two kids, that's 6 devices right there. And that's assuming none of the kids are old enough to have phones, none of the adults have separate work/personal laptops, no separate work phones for the adults, etc.

[jsjohnst]

> 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).

[chmod775]

> but claiming it’s unlikely that someone owns more than five devices is silly

No I specifically said use, not own. You can own more than 5 devices with your mullvad account number, you just can't be connected on all of them at the same time. Also I wasn't expecting people would share their accounts with their family, which is already questionable.

[jsjohnst]

> Also I wasn't expecting people would share their accounts with their family, which is already questionable.

Do families not already share Netflix, iTunes, Spotify, Amazon Prime, etc etc? I’m not sure why it would be such a leap for them to share a VPN, especially if the reason they are using the VPN at all is simply to get around GeoIP restrictions (which I’m not condoning, but obviously many do it).

[jsjohnst]

> Even just owning that many is unlikely.

> No I specifically said use, not own.

These two verbatim quotes from you seem to be in conflict with each other.

[chmod775]

My question was about using that many devices. And I'll quote myself here fully:

> 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.

One sentence is a question, the other is a statement which I consider to be true (and explains how I arrived at that question).

Also it was quite clear from my argument that I was talking about people singular, and you responded pretending I was saying that an entire family owning more than 5 devices is unlikely.

I can't imagine why you'd be arguing like this, I just hope it's not on purpose.

[unixhero]

Is it not fair that you pay for another subscription if you go beyond 5 devices? They do provide a service with their finite resources. It is not a mega corporation.

[PascLeRasc]

Does your router run Merlin or DD-WRT? Throw it on there for your whole home and you'll free up some slots.

[dymax78]

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