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Kai Bitcoin is indeed a public blockchain and horrible for privacy, though there are ways to obtain potential anonymity. Monero however is the real deal and is known as a "Privacy Coin". The blockchain is not public and no one has yet to find a way to expose users transactions. It does use Proof Of Work algorithm like Bitcoin that is energy hungry but Monero's is optimized to make it very hard for large energy hungry data centers to join in on the crypto mining. The energy portion of Monero needs to be improved, however the privacy portion is solid and backed by the privacy community and many private services like Mullvad.

    I love Kagi and am happy to pay for search engines that don't screw users over. However, because one must log in to use Kagi, all our search history is connected to a single account. Unlike Google, we can't just change IP's, clear cookies, open Google in Private browser window, etc to make it harder for Google and friends to track us.

    I trust Kagi far more then Google to do the right thing but many of us who seek a private search engine would like to maintain our anonymity as much as we can when we can. There is very few greater ways to link someones online idneity to their real identity then with their financial info. Every Kagi user that pays is effectively linked to their real identity even if Kagi promises in the future to never change their stance on data collection. By the nature of search it's also very hard to verify if it ever does happen. To make matters worse, as Kagi grows in popularity, governments will know that all payed users of Kagi are connected to their real identities, what more could a government ask for.

    I personally will be holding off on paying for any search engine, not just Kagi, unless/until a private option exists as well. A good chunk of others probably feel the same way if not at least uncomfortable with the thought. There is a benefit for Kagi as well because by accepting Bitcoin or Monero, those who own the coins will have a new service they can spend their money on which will attract even more users to Kagi. Accepting Monero is a great way to get privacy minded people that own Monero to spread the word about Kagi.

    Minimize data collection/potential leakage points is the first step to privacy/anonymity.

      Merged 2 posts from Private Search : Private Payment. Accept Bitcoin and/or Monero..
        9 days later

        I would be happy to financially support Kagi. However, as NoGoogle laid out, hesitation lies with linking our financial information to our search provider. Currently, there is no reason to distrust your promises of privacy, but companies change and governments can compel companies to log data.
        For something as personal as search data, I'd only feel comfortable using Monero as payment (preferably with first party support vs offloading payment validation to third parties). As stated before, Mullvad provides the best example for accepting crypto.
        Here is a relevant article directly from Monero that may be useful if you wish to pursue this.

        Kagi fulfills a niche and is intentionally strict and outspoken on its stance on privacy. That stance in particular draws in a certain crowd of people: those who appreciate privacy preserving services. Your current method of payment (Stripe) does not respect what you have built up.

          11 days later

          Re crypto privacy/energy concerns:

          If you are technically proficient, overcoming the privacy bit is just matter of knowledge and understanding best practices. Similarly, diving into the technical nuances sheds a lot of light onto just how speculative and tenuous much of the energy-related claims floated really are.

          It's virtually impossible to quantify the energy footprint of a crypto payment (despite widely-circulated attempts) and even more difficult to quantify the footprint of processing one credit card payment. On privacy, at worst, paying with crypto is only slightly more private than using a credit card, and at best virtually anonymous.

          I don't see why either should be a concern in this case.

            Vlad Indeed Gift cards are an easy way to offer crypto payments to your users.

            Here are a some providers that I have tried myself

            1. Bitrefiil.com

            EDIT: To learn more, here is a great AMA with the founder https://stacker.news/items/38232
            Large, established player. Offers Gift cards/Vouchers from 186 countries
            No registration required (email-only), but optional
            Supported crypto:

            1. Coincards.com
              Has only US/Canada vouchers in their portfolio, but can be used globally. Should work for Kagi (CA, right?)
              No registration required (email-only) , but optional

            2. Proxysto.re
              Small, but legit shop in Germany. Prices denominated in EUR; not sure they could display prices USD as well. Plus, it might have tax/fx implications if you sell to them in EUR

            Supported crypto: Bitcoin (on-chain only) and Monero
            Cons: Does not offer Bitcoin (Lighting)

              19 days later

              Most in the privacy field won't feel comfortable for a single organization to link search results, an account identifier (email right now) and a payment information.
              While we want to trust Kagi, it could be a government honey pot, bought in the future by greedy corporation, etc.

              So right now we have those 3 pieces of information, when not linked, they don't reveal much.

              From these 3 pieces of information, currently none are anonymous:

              And a part of those can be made anonymous:

              • the account identifier can be made anonymous (using a Mullvad style of random account number instead of email).
              • the payment can be made anonymous by allowing payment by cash, voucher you can buy outside the account (physical voucher and any third party reseller), crypto - to the extent you can trust crypto to be bug-less and their privacy preserving promises).

              And now we're left to trust Kagi only for the search results, which is probably as good as we can get. 🙂

              Vlad Can we get a timeline for when a non credit card payment option will go live?

              Many here which are privacy minded are just eagerly waiting on the sidelines ready to pay.

                  NoGoogle Incorporating any form of payment is a complicated effort taking few weeks of entire teams time. Adding complexity of unfamiliar provider apis, having to change billing structure completely (no recurring payments) and unknown complexity of acounting/tax reporting makes this a very high stakes feature. So we are not eager to jump into it right away until we ship features we currently have in queue.

                      a month later

                      Mullvad recently rolled out a gift card system allowing people to gift (or buy for themselves) a subscription without ever linking their payment data with their account.

                      https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/7/26/mullvad-is-now-available-on-amazon-us-se/

                      Mullvad also accept Monero as payment which, out of all the crypto currencies, is the only one I actually purchase since its actually usable for Private purchases like Donations, VPNs and VPSs

                        pfych It also took Mullvad 13 years to do so (launched in 2009) and millions of dollars in revenue and resources. Note that Kagi launched less than 3 months ago and has a much smaller team, tackling a much bigger problem (Web search vs VPN).

                        We want to be held up to high standards but we should also be realistic about expectations we put in front of the Kagi team.

                            a month later

                            Kai Monero is an actually private crypto coin. Don't know about the energy usage, though I totally agree with your point.

                                Since about 2020, it has become a large burden for a person or business in the USA to comply with all tax codes concerning cryptocurrency. Large enough, that it hardly seems worth the time and cost given the many problems that all cryptocurrencies share when used as a proxy for fiat money. Also, most businesses and non-profits who have heeded the loud calls to accept cryptocurrency have discovered, instead, shockingly unrequited demand—few users will ever pay in cryptocurrency; and of those, most don’t stick with paying with cryptocurrency for more than 1-3 months. From a rational business angle, “crypto” just sucks.

                                  Looking at this thread, I don't really get why this feature it's so desirable.
                                  I'm not saying that it's not useful, or it's not doable, or valuable. But l don't understand why so many of us are voting for this specific feature and write strong comments: I'm not criticizing anyone...it's only that I don't understand.

                                  • are we worried by be identified from a third party, that in this way can know that we are a Kagi user? This is a real "threat", but: is it an important one?

                                  NoGoogle I trust Kagi far more then Google to do the right thing but many of us who seek a private search engine would like to maintain our anonymity as much as we can when we can.

                                  I also don't get that: are we searching a "private" search engine, where we look at Kagi? I'm only looking to quality result without search engine trackers. But how my searches relates to my payment in Kagi? I think in no absolute way.

                                  yifipiyqou I would be happy to financially support Kagi. However, as NoGoogle laid out, hesitation lies with linking our financial information to our search provider. Currently, there is no reason to distrust your promises of privacy, but companies change and governments can compel companies to log data.

                                  Here lies for me the main point: the trust in Kagi team.
                                  All boils down to this, in my opinion:

                                  • if we trust them, then pay with a common payment provider is a no brainer (do we really use NO OTHER digital payment in our life other than crypto? I don't think so)
                                  • if we ... um trust them BUT ... then my question is: why are we trusting their search engine? They could be manipulating our searches, or secretely storing some quantity related to ourselves, and sell all my searches attached to my digital fingerprint to data providers. But really are we thinking this?
                                    Because, if we trust them (and we're paying a monthly fee..so we're trusting them, right?) paying with Stripe or someone else couldn't be a big issue, for now.
                                    (btw: add a crypto payment could be a good thing in the future...I'm just thinking about priority now)
                                        2 months later

                                        seventhwave

                                        I would like you to note that when I made my cryptocurrency wallet I did not have to put in my real name, address and all sort of stuff into that.

                                        Having a name is enough to kill the anonymity of a user(especially when it is confirmed to be real via a credit card). But with cryptocurrency I can trade for goods without sacrificing my personal details. I have nothing to say against Kagi but yes, companies can change.

                                        Just saying, I would start paying for Kagi again with anonymous payments enabled. Right now I use SearX but that doesn't have the proper speed of Kagi and only works when I'm home.

                                        • Vlad replied to this.
                                            6 days later

                                            insomnia-creator I am curious what prevents you from using a an anoymous email (like simplelogin) and anoynomous credit card (like privacyhq)?

                                                11 days later

                                                Vlad It seems that privacyHQ is not available outside the US. There will always be countries where some of these will not be supported.

                                                • STM likes this.

                                                  Lot's of websites these days don't necessarily understand cryptocurrency's all that well but do still see the potential value that they can bring which has led to various companies creating plugins for businesses that want to accept cryptocurrency's as another payment source but don't necessarily want to go though the hassle of understanding it all/exchange rates.

                                                  These are some of the more popular names in the crypto space I keep coming across but you'll want to spend some time looking into how credible they are considering the amount of high profiles scams in this space:
                                                  Commerce.coinbase.com
                                                  Bitpay.com/business

                                                  Monero is the most popular private cryptocurrency in existence right now and the developers have set up a plugin just for accepting Monero only: https://monerointegrations.com/

                                                  Showing these links mostly to show that there is a market segment targeting business that want to quickly easily and painlessly accept crypto but without it's hassles. Many will even convert the crypto back into USD automatically.

                                                    2 months later

                                                    Kai One way around some of the anonymity of the public bitcoin blockchain would be to do the transfer over the Lightning network. There are simple ways for Kagi to do this themselves, including things like BTCPay Server which works onchain and over Lightning. A commercial version would be to use something like Opennode, which would integrate into the site and charges Kagi a 1% fee to convert BTC (onchain or over Lightning) back into USD. Free transfer to bank account then. Or, you can forego the conversion fee and just hold the payments as BTC as well.

                                                    Credit card companies charge over 1% for their fees so you'd save money in the long run using something like Opennode even if you do convert it back to USD.