How to pay for VPN without Visa and Mastercard

In times of chaos, the most needed and vital resource is not food, water and hygiene products, but information. Unfortunately, Internet censorship, especially recently, seeks to protect people from information. The situation is further exacerbated by Russia’s isolation from international payment systems.

In this article, I will show you how you can pay for a VPN using cryptocurrencies. If you are already a beginner blockchain user, you won’t need most of the data in this article. Also in this article, the most concise educational program will be given without the use of cryptocurrency for small transactions like paying for a VPN, with the main emphasis on simplicity and speed, and not on reliability and security. If you want to invest or somehow store your assets in cryptocurrency, you will need a different manual.

To get started, you will need a crypto wallet. I recommend Trust wallet for mobile phone or Exodus wallet for desktop. Export the seed phrase (Trust, Exodus) – 12 or 24 secret words, write them down on a piece of paper and put them in a safe place. The seed phrase looks similar to the picture below. Do not use this seed phrase, you need to generate your own unique and absolutely secret seed phrase.

Do not save your seed phrase to a file and do not transfer it via instant messengers. If something happens to your wallet or device, access to the wallet can be restored from this phrase, including on another device.

Bitcoin transactions are expensive (1-5 usd). But there are rarely bursts of activity on the network, as in Ethereum, and it is not required to spend 20 XRP to initialize an account, as in Ripple. Therefore, our choice is digital gold.

In the wallet you can get your BTC address. It will look like a base58 string, for example Satoshi Nakamoto’s address looks like 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa.

Now we need to buy some BTC to pay for the VPN. I recommend the service bestchange.ru, which provides many exchangers, including for cash or for the Mir card. If you are a client of a bank listed in bestchange, it is better to choose exchangers that work with this particular bank. In a crypto wallet, you can get an address for replenishing BTC, provide it to a crypto exchanger and make an exchange. BTC transactions take up to several hours, so please be patient.

Quite a few VPN providers accept Bitcoin. The list below is just a few of them:

I do not focus this article on the features of fine-tuning VPN or shadowsocks: there are already enough high-quality resources on Habré. But if you are a novice unix user who has run the console at least once in your life, you may find it interesting manual from Lleo by setting outline VPN. In this case, you will need a VPS. You can use any crypto-friendly VPS provider from the list bitcoin vps.

All live until next spring.