[5f3cfa1a]

The answer is always "maybe" until you bring your threat model to the table.

I use a VPN to watch IPTV & download torrents without my ISP sending me nasty letters. Mullvad is great for that.

I would trust it in conjunction with Tor to protect me from low-level crimes. I wouldn't run trust either it or Tor, alone or in combination, to run a marketplace the DEA would become interested in.

If your threat model is obscuring your home IP to hide your IP from above board HTTPS sites, a DIY VPN probably is great. If it's to do low level crime, a cheap VPN is probably enough. Anything else, good luck.

[busterarm]

This.

Between the parent and the other one, it's almost like I specifically pointed out the limited utility of this approach and all of the Well Acktshually posters had to spell it out anyway.

I was responding to someone who said they were technical, so it should be assumed they can work this all out for themselves.

[tomrod]

You provided some great breadcrumbs. I appreciate your responses.

[em-bee]

a DYI VPN may hide my home IP but it does not hide my identity unless the server i route through is not owned by me. also any server that i can use is likely blocked by wikipedia, youtube, reddit, and others because they detect and block hosting services.

[5f3cfa1a]

> a DYI VPN may hide my home IP but it does not hide my identity unless the server i route through is not owned by me.

Again, threat model matters – hide your identity from whom?

You certainly won't hide it from someone who can seize payment records. You will struggle to hide it from someone who has control of enough of the internet to correlate data across sites, like Google or Cloudflare. But if you're looking to be pseudonymous in the face of a single site, or a small set of sites that don't conspire to unmask users? It might work just fine.

(unless as you rightly note they block your hosting service's ASN;-))