Sorry if this has been addressed before or if this isn’t the right place to ask, I haven’t been able to find any other posts on it and the forum guidelines/FAQ is currently broken.
I recently came across Nym and am interested in switching to it, but I have used VPNs long enough to know that even in the best case scenarios you can still sometimes experience slower speeds, higher latency, or connection interruptions. It seems Nym currently requires that you connect to a minimum of 2 nodes which leads me to assume that issues with speed or reliability must generally be worse or more common compared to “single-hop” VPNs. I bet NymVPN works well most of the time for most things but I worry that it could more frequently be an issue when video broadcasting, video calling, online gaming, or connecting from a slow network. Some might say that you shouldn’t use a VPN at all in those scenarios, but privacy protection or censorship circumvention isn’t something everyone can simply choose to disable without consequences.
I bet I’m not the only one who’s unable to pay for both a NymVPN and centralized VPN subscription but still want the option to switch between the benefits of both. The litepaper’s comparison of NymVPN vs Traditional VPNs lists the multi-hop default as a benefit Nym has over traditional VPNs, but forcing multi-hop may simultaneously be a downside when considering you can opt for faster single-hop speeds on traditional VPNs as needed.
Multi-hop is core to Nym’s privacy and marketing, so to prevent any confusion Nym could make this single-hop feature disabled by default. Users trying to enable it should be presented a disclaimer and second confirmation panel to ensure they understand what it entails. As far as I understand, basically anyone can host a Nym node which would obviously present a serious risk for a single-hop mode. I don’t know enough about Nym but does Nym Technologies (or any trusted partner) host any Nym nodes themselves? If so, perhaps a single-hop mode could exclusively connect users to trusted nodes, just like traditional VPNs?