I’ve been hearing a lot about the new Mysterium blockchanin based vpn. The Mystereim developers have stated its an anonymous vpn thats better than Tor and the “pay for” vpn in many ways. AFAICT it’s a token based decentralized p2p network based on the Ethereum blockchain. Clients are able to “earn” tokens by renting a portion of their bandwidth to the network. The node operators are compensated with the tokens. You can read the Mysterium Whitepaper 2 or you can go to their site here 3 for more info.
I obviously have a few questions I was hoping someone could help me out with.
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Mysterium is based on the Etheruem blockchain so does that imply that its just as secure or even more secure than other vpn solutions like Openvpn.
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If Mysterium is in fact a secure VPN solution can it be chained with Tor? I know the Etherium client uses a listner ( TCP ) port and a discovery ( UDP ) port so would this mean users would have to tunnel Mysterium through Tor if they wanted to chain the two of them together?
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The developers claim Mysterium is an anonymity network thats comparable to or even better than Tor in some ways like higher network bandwidth and more financial incentive to be a node opperator which in turn will lead to more node opperators . (see the Mysterium Whitepaper competitive Analysis Graph ) I’m having a hard time believing that.
a) Tor is free to use whereas users pay to use the Mysterium network ( Winner Tor ).
b) If you are paying for the Mysterium network with tokens that leaves some sort of “paper trail” that would take away from user pseudonymity. ( Winner Tor ).
c) I’m far from being an expert but I thought the Ethereum blockchain was designed to be a secure p2p network not a anonymity network, whereas Tor was designed from the beginning to be an anonymous network. ( Winner Tor )
Those are just a few ways Tor comes out on top of Mysterium. Are they just saying Mysterium is better than Tor and current VPN solutions to drum up press and user base or could Mysterium be the great tech that they say it is? It sounds like a great idea but I’ve always been told that if something sounds to good to be true then stay away from it. I hope I’m wrong
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