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VPNs are almost ubiquitous in today's world, most people have at least some experience with using them and many people use them regularly. They're popular for a reason but they don't come without risks and downsides. The biggest risk being that VPN companies are able to keep logs due to their centralized nature and one of the bigger downsides being the subscription based payment method most of them use. deals with those two problems by decentralizing their VPN and changing the payment method from a subscription to a pay-per-use system.
What makes Mysterium decentralized?
Anyone can become a node-runner. You yourself could be a part of the network by simply allowing your computer to be used as an end-point for anyone who wants to make use of this VPN. As of right now there are thousands of nodes from pretty much every major country and many from smaller countries such as Kazakhstan for example. The sky is the limit as to how many nodes there can be. You can even use a Raspberry Pi to become a node runner.
How does it work?
Same as any other VPN for the most part, the biggest difference being the payment method. Instead of buying X amount of months of access to the service you instead get the choice of depositing a certain amount of money into your account and pay only if you use the actual service. You can pay either with credit card or a number of crypto currencies, such as Mysteriums own token which I'll talk about the end of this article. From there on out it works just like any other VPN, all you need to do is look at the available nodes and choose any one of them.
But how much does it cost?
Simply put, it depends. The price is determined on a per country basis by a supply and demand algorithm that takes a look at supply and demand, obviously, and a few other factors and comes up with what it believes to be a fair price. The more nodes there are in any given country the cheaper it is to use nodes from that country, generally.
Mysterium's own Token
As mentioned above it does have its own token called Myst, as of right it can only be used as a payment method for Mysterium but that may change very soon. The devs behind Mysterium are currently in the process of changing the tokenomics with the help of the IQ Protocol and you can read about how exactly they're planning to do this right . It's definitely worth a look in my opinion.
You can find every place to buy the token right on their website. Myst is currently hovering at 50 cents, with a 10 million marketcap with a total supply of just 31 million tokens. There's a lot of room for growth. I'd recommend buying it on Polygon as their integration with the IQ Protocol will apparently make use of the Polygon Mainnet, if you don't have any Polygon I'd recommend an exchange like FixedFloat which has the mainnet token.
