My Evaluation of Mysterium, Cryptocurrency ICO

Mysterium

Mysterium proposes to provide decentralized VPN via the blockchain. OK let’s jump in.

White paper is written in English that is obviously the writer’s second language. A tighter ship would have hired a native speaker to edit it. Red flag in my book.

Their mission is to return privacy to a world that has lost it entirely. The white paper gives a mildly inspiring message to all of us about how important it is to be able to protect one’s activities from the prying eyes of governments and corporations. It’s a worthy goal.

Here are the six use cases they outline for the need for on-demand privacy:

Travel to censorship-heavy foreign nations.
Private conversations about sensitive subjects.
Corporate espionage.
Journaiists and whistleblowers.
Political dissidents and activists protesting an oppressive regime.
They basically repeat 4 and 5.

How do they accomplish this objective? From the white paper:

“Mysterium aims to be fully decentralized, peer to peer based and serverless node network, designed to provide privacy restoring techniques to its users with financial incentivization to its node operators (providers). Mysterium achieves this goal by utilizing already-existing technologies such as Ethereum blockchain, smart contracts and advancing their features with state-channels, evolving mechanisms of promises, combined with censorship-evasion protocols developed by the community acting as applications of the network. Once Phase I Stage 1 is developed and released - this Network will protect user privacy and data, while enabling all users to share their spare bandwidth access with those who need this open access in exchange for financial compensation.”

Stage 1 of Phase 1 is not complete. It might not even be started. Red flag. But they plan to run VPNs on Ethereum. OK. Cool story bro.

And that’s the end of their technical description. Maybe it’s a secret? Let’s check out the development team:

Three developers, one of whose titles includes “Jack of all trades.” Not a notable accomplishment among them.

Story: Web site is dreadful. Badly written and designed.

PASS.