Comment by mhitza
1 year ago
The post hints at this, but having a shop where one can buy a privacy pass without an account makes sense.
Should support some crypto currency (probably monero), and something like GNU Taler if that technology ever becomes usable.
Kagi accepts bitcoins but Vlad (the founder) mentioned on their forum that so few people use this option that it does not make sense to work on accepting Monero.
(vlad here) Rather, we are opportunistic about it and we want to focus on things that make impact (which most of the time is search, not billing). If there is enough demand, we will work on Monero support - and yes I agree, buying privacy pass tokens, without even needing an account, is one of those super-cool use cases.
I know I’m just one guy, but lack of Monero support kept me away.
This feature looks like it narrows the gap a bit though.
Nice work
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I'd love to pay for Kagi with crypto, the main thing for me is the steep transfer fees. Nevertheless those can be offset somewhat with bulk payments. How about ability to buy like 3 years of Kagi at a time with crypto?
When I try to go into billing in Kagi I just get forwarded to Stripe. Does Stripe process the crypto payments?
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Nobody wants to use BTC because of high fees and at this point its less a usable exchange of value than speculative asset. I personally would only ever use and trust a online service advertised as private/anonymous if it actually supported a private and anonymous currency (like some vpns do).
Anyone claiming high fees is straw manning
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Kagi's privacy guarantee is more of a "trust me bro" and I say that as a Kagi subscriber. While they may claim that they preserve privacy or anonimity as long as it's tied to a user account, or payment information nothing prevents them from associating searches with user. Even protonmail enabled logging for a particular user at one point. Their guarantee is on the same level.
At the same time, privacy pass is a very foreign concept to me. If they are transferable between devices, one could generate a couple and resell them over some other medium (even in person).
We implemented Privacy Pass exactly so that you do not need to trust any claims we make but as a user have a (provable, cryptographically) mechanism that guarantees this, with one click, whenever you need it.
the privacy pass extension is open source exactly because users can then verify the process. and yeah, to prevent reselling they've made it so you can't get infinite tokens.
>as long as it's tied to a user account, or payment information
Privacy Pass unties the searches from the user account and payment information.
I agree that third party stores selling tokens without any account at all would be the ideal solution, but without an account you'd be missing out on many of the features that make kagi worth using like being able to remove certain domains from results or prioritizing types of results over others.
Add the ability to export your account config (yaml?) and use it with privacy pass. Maybe even sync it with git.
To avoid fingerprinting by config, have a page where the community can share and vote on best configs, then clone and use a popular one that suits your needs.
This defeats the purpose of Privacy Pass. Something similar is discussed in the post: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass#:~:text=customizatio...
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