08-12-2025 
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A few days ago, a video titled Exposing the Billion Dollar Secret VPN Companies Are Hiding went viral among privacy advocates, echoing the concerns I have shared about the technology for many years.
In the video, the host showed, with receipts, how Facebook’s Onavo VPN, marketed as a data‑saving app, was secretly used to spy on competitors. Engineers working on Project Ghostbusters decrypted Snapchat’s traffic to feed usage analytics, and Onavo even paid teenagers to install the app before public backlash forced it to shut down, according to vpncentral.com.
That abuse is part of a much broader pattern. In 2017, an Israeli firm formerly called Crossrider (a company whose ad‑injection toolkits were once widely used to distribute malware) reinvented itself as Kape Technologies and began buying up VPN brands. Within four years, it had acquired CyberGhost, ZenMate, Private Internet Access and, for $936 million, so today, three of the six most‑popular VPNs are now controlled by Kape, which has ties to Unit 8200, Israel’s signals‑intelligence branch, and its majority owner, Teddy Sagi, has a history of financial crimes and links to Israeli intelligence. An industry that sells itself as privacy protection is in reality dominated by firms with deep incentives to surveil users.
That consolidation matters because an estimated 1.6 billion people rely on VPNs for privacy and censorship resistance! When just a few companies control the pipes, they control the data. As the video argues, this is the same bait‑and‑switch that has plagued the broader tech industry: products marketed as empowering or private often serve primarily to harvest data. Whether it’s a social network, a search engine, or a VPN, the same actors build the platform, collect the data, and monetize it.
How Bitcoin lost its way
That same bait‑and‑switch has occurred in the world of Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper envisioned a peer‑to‑peer electronic cash system. Yet, over the last decade, the loudest voices have recast BTC as digital gold. Because its supply is fixed at 21 million coins, they claim, mere ownership will somehow save the world and maybe even “end the Fed” by making BTC a pristine reserve asset.
There are at least two problems with this narrative. First, scarcity matters only if the asset is widely used. A network that handles seven transactions per second (TPS) and charges dollars in fees cannot replace Venmo, let alone Visa (NASDAQ: V) or core banking. As long as BTC is too slow and expensive for everyday payments, holding it does nothing to restrain central banks. Second, the digital‑gold pitch invites centralization.
Custodial platforms and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) now dominate BTC trading, and companies like PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL) offer “crypto” products that keep users inside banking rails. Like Kape buying VPNs to create the illusion of competition, venture capitalists (VCs) spun up a group of shell companies and firms to recast BTC as a speculative asset dependent on infrastructure that appears to be competing, while in reality, a very small group of people win no matter which direction the consumer goes.
A token locked in custody and traded on exchanges cannot threaten the Federal Reserve any more than a corporate VPN managed by former intelligence agents can protect your privacy.
Rediscovering peer‑to‑peer finance
The antidote to the money problem and the privacy problem lies in BSV blockchain, the network which emerged from BTC and BCH amid the temptation to sell out to Big Tech, Big Banks, and Big Government control of bitcoin.
BSV restores the original protocol, removes arbitrary block‑size limits, and scales for usage, which solves the problems of banking, finance, payments, and data privacy all on one network! It retains the unspent‑transaction‑output (UTXO) model, so each output is a self‑contained coin with its own script. Smart contracts live in individual outputs rather than a global account, meaning a compromised wallet doesn’t jeopardize the network, and the failure of one app or wallet means nothing to the security of the system as a whole. No man-in-the-middle attacks, network-wide take-overs, or surveillance is even possible if you just use the network for everything you need.
On top of this foundation, developers have built tools that mirror the functionalities misused by Onavo and Kape, without needing trust. 1Sat Ordinals and the BSV21 standard let anyone mint tokens as lightweight as satoshis, and those tokens can be used to encrypt or decrypt data packets on the network, or they can act as DNS records, file server endpoints, Oauth servers, or even entire websites or robust applications.
Tokens live in individual outputs, so financial apps can also use them in conjunction with web and security applications so that any interaction (social or financial) can meet on‑chain without relying on a central smart contract or external exchange.
BitcoinSchema.org publishes open schemas in open source repos, so applications can embed messages, documents and credentials into transactions in a standardized way. TreeChat.ai shows how a social network can live on‑chain with users owning their posts, and SigmaIdentity.com and Sigma Auth anchor identity documents and access to Bitcoin keys without entrusting data to a central platform.
Combined with token standards like 1Sat Ordinals, these projects form a toolkit for building Web3 apps where data and value flow on the same network completely without friction, much the same way as your favorite social media site and your bank both exist on the Internet.
Data is the new currency
These tools matter because the real battle isn’t just about payments. The richest fortunes of the last twenty years were made by turning user data into a commodity and selling it to the highest bidders. The VPN exposé shows how far companies will go to capture that commodity. BSV’s answer is to treat data as money itself. Its metanet turns messages and files into encrypted Bitcoin transactions that only the owner can decrypt.
Rather than routing data through internet service providers (ISPs) or VPNs that log everything, you use the same peer‑to‑peer network that secures value. Under this model, a VPN’s job shrinks to circumventing regional blocks because privacy is built, fundamentally, into the communication/transaction protocol.
Choosing the new Internet
The current web is bleak. Surveillance capitalism has colonised our VPNs and social feeds, and the digital‑gold narrative has hollowed out Bitcoin’s promise. Yet there is a way forward. BSV’s scalability, open data standards, and token infrastructure make it possible to build financial and social applications that respect privacy and operate at Internet scale. Adopting tools like TreeChat.ai for social media, SigmaIdentity.com for identity, BitcoinSchema.org for data structure, and 1SatOrdinals.com for assets allows us to reclaim our digital lives.
We can replace Facebook logins and Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) cookies with keys we control and shrink the VPN market to its proper role because our communications will be private by design.
Leaving the old Internet behind isn’t radical; it’s simply refusing to be the product. It means recognising that data is the most valuable commodity on earth and choosing to exist on a network that treats it that way. It means moving away from a “store‑of‑value” obsession and toward building the kind of peer‑to‑peer economy Satoshi described. The status quo is ominous, but the solution is within reach. It isn’t about ending the Federal Reserve or surveillance capitalism through abstention; it’s about routing around the surveillance economy by making data and money flow together on a public ledger.
That ledger exists today, and its name is BSV blockchain.
Watch: History of Bitcoin with Kurt Wuckert Jr.
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