OK, so, I have a couple of questions:
- What's the worst that can happen if I don't use a VPN while pirating?
- Are free tier VPNs (like Proton VPN) good enough?
- I don't want to pay much or anything for a VPN, is a way I can get a good free one, or set one myself somehow (I have experience with selfhosting) ?
- If not, which cheap one do you recommend?
EDIT: I pirate mostly movies, and rarely some TV series.
Torrents yes, always VPN. If you're doing the debrid route, not required but personally I still do.
I am a big fan of mullvad VPN as they take no info from you to create an account. Can pay with crypto. No name, email or anything tied to their service. Used proton, nord and pia in the past.
Depends on how hard your country cracks down on individual piracy. If you've heard a friend of yours in the same country being served a copyright notice for pirating; you absolutely need a VPN. If you've never heard of this and the idea sounds impossible, you typically won't need it.
If you will need a VPN; I would heavily recommend Proton VPN for convenience. If you want to selfhost you're going to need a server in a different country which will still cost you money. Assuming you'll pay for a typical sbc + gigabit internet + electricity costs + remote maintenance costs and you'll be looking at a way bigger cost than just 60 euros a year. That's how much ProtonVPN costs.
- they sue you for a portion of your future savings, because you single-handedly responsible for their imaginary loss of profits, judge agrees.
- free tier vpns are good enough. But the competition amongst “no log” vpns is pretty fierce. People say you can only trust 3 specific vpns who would rather shut down than spy for a government, but if you’re just downloading movies then you can expand your choices.
- the point of the vpn is to hide your ip address. Self hosting in your home defeats purpose. The best free option is using I2P for torrenting.
- Wait till December for all the Christmas discounts. An annual bundle works out to $2-4 a month.
If you are doing any downloads (especially torrents) you should be using a VPN.
- Your ISP will usually send a letter telling you to stop, in some cases they've been known to cut peoples service.
- Free vpns sell your data and usually have caps, but would probably prevent you from getting letters in the mail.
- What is cheaper? A vpn account or paying for 2-3 streaming services?
- I use a nordvpn account I bought from a reseller. Back when I got it nordvpn was still pretty good, but idk how people feel about it nowadays.
Where do you live? If you are in the global South, nobody cares and you can pirate raw as much as you want. If you live in the anglosphere, you should probably get one. I'm the US your ISP might give you a warning or two but they will probably cut service. If you're in Germany don't let the VPN ever come down.
The worst outcome of torrenting without a VPN depends on what country you live in. In the US, theoretically the worst thing that can happen is going to prison for many years and paying a huge fine, but as long as you’re not monetarily profiting somehow, realistically you’ll get multiple warnings to stop from your ISP and the government before it escalates to that point. The worst thing that can happen is your ISP cancels your service and blacklists you, which can be bad if they have a monopoly on internet service in your area.
Look in a Debird service. And pay with crypto.Then you are completely anonymous. All torrenting is done far from you and sent back over https.
Cryptocurrency is not necessarily anonymous. Buying bitcoin from a broker leaves a record connecting your payment method to your wallet. Even if you mine them yourself, doesn't your IP address show up on the public ledger? I guess if you somehow bought bitcoin in cash...
Is there a more private cryptocurrency I'm not considering?
I consider it more private than like a credit card at least your name's not attached to it.
And if you really want to you can just use a credit card at an on-ramp exchange, then take that and swap it for a different crypto on a exchange that doesn't require any registration. Then it becomes effectively completely anonymous.
Monero is the private one. But also if you transfer your broker gotten bitcoins to another bitcoin wallet there is no evidence that that belongs to you. You can have sent them to someone else.
IPs do not show in any ledgers
Internet without VPN is like sending all your things on postcards instead of in envelopes in the mail. Yea https and more mitigate a lot but still.
