Mullvad gives you a discount if you pay with crypto, and monero is supposed to be the private crypto. What is the best way to get Monero? I’m in Canada

https://mullvad.net/en/pricing

  • utopiah@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    Private? I’m pretty sure any of the existing means are private in the sense that I, a random stranger, will not know about that transaction.

    Do you mean anonymous? Pseudonymous? Hidden from your government or the government where MullVad is established?

    I’m not trying to be pedantic here but rather to genuinely understand so that I can try to answer.

  • snekerpimp@lemmy.snekerpimp.space
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    2 days ago

    Mining it for two or three weeks usually pays my 3 month plan at airvpn, with a modern AMD processor, not sure how the modern intel processors mine. It’s probably the best way to anonymously obtain xmr. Xmrig has good documentation and is fairly easy to set up. Cake wallet has a way to purchase crypto with a cc, but not xmr directly, would have to purchase litecoin then swap to xmr in the app.

    • FireIced@lemmy.super.ynh.fr
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      2 days ago

      Mining isn’t economically worth it and it’s also bad for your components’ health as well as the environment

      • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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        17 hours ago

        Exchanging money is also not economically worth it. And if you only pay for renewable electricity it isn’t bad for the environment either, at least on paper.

            • FireIced@lemmy.super.ynh.fr
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              15 hours ago

              The components health section is probably nearly void, it seems like the lifespan of a CPU isn’t impacted if it doesn’t overheat. You’re probably right on that, I’m not a hardware expert though.

              Mining seems not worth it imo, based on my experience, but someone told me otherwise 🤷

              It is most certainly bad for the environment. Even if you use green energy, the infrastructure used to deliver the energy isn’t green when initially created and has a limited lifespan. Also, you probably remove green energy from people that didn’t care at the same time, so it ends up having a negative impact. If the green energy production % doesn’t change, then someone uses more non-green energy if you start using green.

              • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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                15 hours ago

                I didn’t even address the component wear because I didn’t know either way. 😁

                But as long as you pay for green energy none of that money will go towards supporting non-green infrastructure. So it should incentivise the energy companies to invest more into green ones.

                Of course it doesn’t change where your energy is really coming from. Most likely from the gas plant around the corner. But maybe from your rich neighbour’s solar panels.

                • FireIced@lemmy.super.ynh.fr
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                  14 hours ago

                  But as long as you pay for green energy none of that money will go towards supporting non-green infrastructure. So it should incentivise the energy companies to invest more into green ones.

                  I believe people getting non-green energy will just get less green energy, at least that’s how I would imagine it if there was already enough green energy for the ones who demand it. Instead of making more green energy, they’ll just send less green energy to the people that aren’t paying for green energy. If your country doesn’t produce a lot of it, then yea it’ll certainly incentivise the production of it, but I feel like keeping green energy only for premium payers, without developping infrastructure is more worth it to them.

      • snekerpimp@lemmy.snekerpimp.space
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        2 days ago

        Mining on a cpu is much less taxing than a gpu, and if you do it intermittently and do not run all cores there’s no additional strain on hardware.

            • FireIced@lemmy.super.ynh.fr
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              2 days ago

              I believe if it was worth it to mine, everyone would do it until it is not anymore, especially in countries where electricity is extra cheap

              After testing on my machine, I ended up losing more than 10x the amount I paid in electricity in France. I’m not sure it’ll be better elsewhere. This was at 0.20€/kWh

            • utopiah@lemmy.ml
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              1 day ago

              solar helps that number even more

              Wouldn’t that assume you are not using all the electricity coming from your panels?

        • irotsoma@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 day ago

          Not sure that’s true. And mining on a CPU is even less efficient. Your hash rate will be way lower unless you’ve got a really high-end system with a really low latency bus and RAM. And if your hashrate is too low, it would take months for you to find a single block unless you’re pooling with a bunch of others and splitting the profit. It’s quite variable, but very, very few people can make profit on any popular coins. Too many people to compete with to find a block.

          Oh and don’t forget cooling cost. The fans in the computer, the fans in your house, and your air conditioner in your house need to disipate the heat and there’s a lot more generated per clock cycle from a CPU than a GPU using comperably old technologies. If you live somewhere that you’re producing more electricity with solar than you consume, then it’s probably not a cold climate.

            • irotsoma@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              3 hours ago

              Even if the algorithm will perform better on CPUs than other crypto algorithms, there’s still the fact that the processor in a GPU is much less complex and so: many more tasks can run in parallel because they’re all very similar, the bus is much shorter, bandwidth to memory is much higher, and memory is generally much higher performing. So overall, mining on a GPU will generally be more energy efficient than on a CPU. And of course crypto becomes harder and harder to mine as they grow, by design.

    • CashDragon@realbitcoin.cash
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      1 day ago

      Haveno is exchange software it is not an active exchange where you can trade. RetoSwap is the Haveno instance that is running an actual usable exchange.

      • Mas@jlai.lu
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        1 day ago

        So Haveno is exchange platform, that’s what I said. II didn’t say instance but platform, Lemmy is a platform and lemmy.ml is an instance.

        • CashDragon@realbitcoin.cash
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          22 hours ago

          I see you edited the comment, suspect. Anyway there is only one instance so it is useless to tell someone about haveno and not mention the only usable instance.

          • Mas@jlai.lu
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            12 hours ago

            My comment was edited well before your reply, just look at the date and time…

  • Rhonda Sandtits@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 days ago

    Go to whatever service/exchange is easiest for you to buy a common crypto that has low fees (either Litecoin or Doge) and use https://changenow.io/ to swap to monero and send to your own wallet.

    Use Guiwallet on desktop or for mobile you can use either cake wallet or monerujo wallet to hodl your monero.

    Just transfer $20 into monero every couple of months and use it to buy time on mullvad as you need

    • FireIced@lemmy.super.ynh.fr
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      2 days ago

      This is the easiest way.

      • Use a centralized exchange (like Kraken, Binance…)
      • Buy LTC, BCH, anything you want
      • withdraw that
      • Swap (exchange) those through a swap service, from the crypto you bought, to XMR.
        • https://trocador.app/ is an exchange aggregator that’s privacy friendly and Monero friendly if you want. They don’t take any cut and you can get better margins this way.
      • Optional but I recommend it: churn your crypto by sending all of it to yourself multiple times, waiting a few days between each churn. Easier to do with Feather Wallet on desktop as it has coin control. This minimizes the links to your identity: Monero shines through multiple transactions, but tx to tx can statistically be liked. The more you do, the blurrier it gets.
        • On Feather Wallet (which is open source), there’s a “coins” tab where you can see each unit of crypto you have, and can “sweep output” to “yourself (churn)” easily.
      • Spend your XMR, have fun :)
      • FireIced@lemmy.super.ynh.fr
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        2 days ago

        Additional notes:

        The initial crypto should be a relatively famous one with low transaction fees so you don’t lose a lot in the process. The two I wrote are nice.

        For swapping, the higher the amount, the lower the fee % will be. Always try trading over $20 to minimize fees.

  • CashDragon@realbitcoin.cash
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    2 days ago

    There is a decentralized and anonymous exchange where you can buy Monero for fiat currency. https://retoswap.com/

    If you already use a common exchange the best is to buy Bitcoin Cash then run it through CashFusion to break the link, then you can use it to pay for goods and services privately.

    CashFusion - True Privacy on Bitcoin Cash - https://odysee.com/@backyarddirectors:c/cashfusion-true-privacy-on-bitcoin-cash:c