Thanks for the answer; I certainly don’t want to send any money to Israel, if possible. Does anyone have any recommendations for alternatives? I just have two requirements: I need the connection uptime to be rock solid. I also need to be able to register and pay completely anonymously. I’m not that concerned about bandwidth.
Does that matter if they have none of my data? I mean, they could log unencrypted traffic but for web browsing you should be forcing https wherever possible, so traffic logs would be mostly irrelevant. No doubt, they can see what you torrent but I can’t imagine it matters that much if they have no data about you. They could certainly build a fingerprint based on torrents and unencrypted traffic but I feel like it may be too weak to be relevant. Maybe people worry about using the official clients? But you don’t need to use them either, you can just establish a raw OpenVPN tunnel.
Been using PIA for over a decade now. I started with them by paying with a random gift card I had laying around (Walmart maybe?) and have been paying with crypto ever since. They’ve never asked for any personal details (used a burner email address) and the service has been solid the entire time. Clients on Windows and Linux both work great and are open source with pretty decent documentation. In short, sometimes I want to reliably remain anonymous online and it has worked out well for me.
I know that a lot of people here hate on PIA but I haven’t seen any justification. So if anyone here knows why I shouldn’t be using the service, I’d love to hear about it; I’d be happy to switch to something else if it works at least as well.
One thing to note on your first point: Generally speaking, the only time that equity loss doesn’t make a difference is if there is no mortgage. If you do have a mortgage; When housing prices are stagnate or increase, you can sell your home for a similar one with little to no loss (the buyer of your house effectively pays off your old mortgage and you roll your equity into your new mortgage).
BUT, if prices tank while you still have a significant portion of your mortgage owed: you’re screwed when you need to relocate. The sell price of your house won’t cover the reminder of the mortgage. If you need to move, you either pay it off (hope you don’t need to move for work) or foreclose. The bank is cool with either - they couldn’t care less about you.
Edit: Clarity and typos.