# Why VPNs are scams and what to do about it by Harry Halpin | Devcon SEA

- Speakers: [Harry Halpin](https://streameth.org/speakers/harry-halpin)
- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 08:59
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-4Ir-fptXPr8
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ir-fptXPr8

## Description

Existing VPNs are essentially scams. Free VPNs and most centralized VPNs (such as ExpressVPN, owned by Kape) are effectively data harvesting companies.  Decentralized VPNs usually have a few large servers and offer barely any more privacy than centralized VPNs. What is missing is 1) onion-routing packets like Tor 2)  adding noise (fake traffic) 3) censorship-resistance and 4) mixing packets from different users together. We'll explore how technologies work to defeat even AI adversaries.

Speaker(s): Harry Halpin
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: Cypherpunk & Privacy
Keywords: censorship, resistance, Decentralization, Privacy, Use Cases

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Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
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## Transcript

[Music] [Music] PN are scams and what to do about it hey everybody okay cool thank you so much for coming so vpns how many people here have a VPN okay uh can people just name a few they have what do you what do you use expressvpn mad not so bad proton free and ivpn they take Bitcoin which is cool I don't know that one but okay so I'm just gonna explain I'm Harry Halpin I did my uh PhD in uh language models which are now very fun uh and a big deal but I gave up on working on them because what I realized is that machine learning is very dangerous and can cause problems and basically identify who you are no matter what you're doing on the internet and one particular source of data for machine learning and identifying people are vpns VPN are scams all centralized vpns are scams some of them are slightly nicer than others but it's still basically like protons like yo we're Swiss trust me bro same with uh you know mad we Swedish trust me and a lot of VPN would you think are separate companies such as uh nordvpn private internet surf shark they're all ran by like essentially malware delivery companies or data collection companies they essentially Honeypot your data so they can connect your data when I use a VPN I simply connect to someone else's computer that computer sees all of my traffic they know exactly what I'm doing on the internet and they can connect that to my credit card and my address and they can bundle that data and sell it sometimes to governments uh to ads it's just they're they're absolutely terrible decentralized vpns have been going on for a while how many mysterium folks we have in the house or Orchid but the problem is they don't provide actual privacy you can an adversary can just look at the dvpn and de anonymize you so what we've decided to do at Nim is we're trying to produce a VPN that's both decentralized and actually delivers privacy even against government level surveillance using AI algorithms so we do this by adding noise to your connection so when you connect to a normal VPN they kind of know exactly what you're doing when you connect to a decentralized VPN a group of nodes knows exactly what you're doing what we do is we encrypt each packet separately similar to tour but unlike tour we mix the packets up and we that's a mixet for people that are interested in that and then we add fake traffic or noise so this is a comparison this is uh your normal VPN you can see this guy can see everything you're doing and this produces a unique fingerprint of your data Nim on the other hand adds fake traffic and the packets come out anonymized and again it's a decentralized network as a decentralized network anyone can run a node you get rewarded in Nim tokens uh we use zero knowledge proofs to log in so you just send some tokens to a Smart contract you get back a zero knowledge proof and you log in using a zero knowledge proof so you don't have your address but we can prove that you paid open source so forth and so on this is maybe a nice little uh overview of the differences so again decentralized routing no single company in charge that can put in a back door open source mixing packets adding cover traffic and unlinking any payments uh to your session and you know we have a lot of other cool stuff we have apis uh you could in theory and if you look up my ethereum uh eth d our ethereum Amsterdam talk we even showed how to integrate against ethereum validators to prevent various DDS attacks on the ethereum consensus algorithm and you can hook up to like uh client software metamask is a bit tricky but you could use Helios and whatnot and anonymize your transactions that way so if you're interested uh we would like you to give it a shot it's on Google Play it's in test flight not quite an app store uh Devcon whatever just give us a shot and I want to say when you install it you you get something that looks like this you got to download it right so when you go to you go to nvp and.com download and then the confusing part is you have to enter your email don't worry you can enter a fake one we don't care we don't act it's just like you enter random strings um and then you get a QR code or this this is a small zero knowledge proof and then when you start up the VPN you can choose if you want to be fast which is no mixing or you want to be anonymous which is a mix net so we mix your packets up and then you choose like where you want to come in the nearest nodes I think here is Singapore or where you want to come out and then you cut and paste that uh oop sorry you cut and paste that QR code in and then it just works so that's it we have a lot of cool stuff coming please try it out it's free for a month so we can defeat [ __ ] authoritarians uh like Donald Trump and all these [ __ ] okay so uh yeah that's it uh time for Q&A okay Q&A time so in this stage we will be throwing this microphone so raise up your hand if you have a question oh equal opportunity [ __ ] uh the Deep State Democrats as well just just so you know you're first okay catch it sorry I'm not very good at this um I just want to know what's the main complaint of your current users it's mostly crazy cryptocurrency people doing beta testing so we have a lot of people in countries which have S some form of censorship uh folks in Russia China um we're still working on some of the censorship prevention techniques they're get around like you know certain kind of firewalls but mostly it's just crypto people who are token holders or just trying out and having fun I think we have about five 6,000 people downloaded using it so but it just started basically but unlike a normal VPN the more people that use it the more Anonymous you are unlike tour or normal VPN so 5,000 people is a reasonable size in many set Yeah you mentioned earlier mysterium and orid and they both are on the market since the time and they both struggle really to get any significant amount of users like what what do you think what do you think something we can do about that to get more people to that decentralized world yeah you got to on board the normies like normies so the problem was uh we looked at Orchid I like seven he's a cool dude uh but the problem is that they said oh pay as you go so I want to pay for a gigabyte or a megabyte normal people don't do that and they also required like some weird token stuff to get the thing going and most people have trouble buying tokens right so what we do is we just have a normal Fiat interface stripe if you like Bitcoin my BTC pay and we take that um payment in Fiat or whatever and then an API converts that uh over to Nim token and then and then we do an automatic buy of nim token tokens on the open market so it's all invisible the token part and there's tokens that reward the nodes uh it's all invisible to the enduser I think the key is to make it look and act as much as possible like a normal VPN but also offer features that normal vpns don't have so we have this Anonymous mode a mix net which no one else has for the world's first decentralized actually Anonymous mixnet you know support Chelsea Manning works for me Julius s is a big fan and that's something that no normal VPN has okay last question question I'm around afterwards you grab me afterwards run run run throw the ball uh why doesn't T just add noise uh T has looked at it actually had dinner with Roger last night you can ask him this question they are considering uh but tour is not a mixet so tour optimiz for Speed which is reasonable for them to do back in when they started their code and they weren't like it's it's complex you have to have like figure out like you guys have to do some form of traffic shaping and at the time this was a harder thing to do mad's also looking into adding noise I think they have it working on iOS or one of their clients it's actually really it's a large map tricking machine learning so U mix Nets particularly what we are called continuous time mix Nets we actually do a default what's called traffic shaping to pan processes so you don't know when you're packet R we always know the average time and that makes adding noise much easier okay I think that's it I'm sorry