This is my sentiment as well. I’m not a fan of bitcoin and to see Proton promoting it is disappointing.
I’ll still happily stay an Unlimited subscriber, but hope they don’t start taking on more than they can handle and their other products suffer.
1 Like
I’ve very quickly gone from being positive about Proton to considering jumping ship and canceling my Unlimited subscription. Mail is very good but VPN port forwarding has been broken for too long, they’re lagging a bit on supporting my OS of choice, and now my money is going toward bitcoin nonsense. My only real hesitation is that for mail it’s difficult to find something which checks all the boxes but doesn’t delete my account the moment I can’t pay. Already got burned by mailbox.org on that.
5 Likes
Likewise, if Proton keeps coming out with nonsense, I’m going to seriously think about seeing what they’re doing elsewhere. I really don’t want my unlimited subscription to go to that kind of crap, and there are quite a few good alternatives to Proton. Seriously, a Bitcoin wallet, who the hell asked the Proton team for that? WHO? Nobody asked that, so why?
Let Proton focus on its core business, credible privacy-friendly alternatives to Google, and improve its core products already.
4 Likes
This sounds like an issue from the category of: E2EE makes it very hard to catch pedophiles and other criminals.
It’s either “security” or freedom and privacy, and I will be picking the latter one.
Much of the tax evasion is happening in plain sight, with all of those corporations and companies using loopholes to avoid paying taxes without any consequences whatsoever.
Banks and accounting firms are the worst when it comes to money loundering and tax evasion. Cryptocurrencies are at the very bottom.
3 Likes
This is more for financial freedom (Paypal tried to kill Proton) than for privacy per se.
2 Likes
Exactly! They even state it in the Proton Wallet article:
Early in our journey, we experienced first-hand what it’s like being cut off from the financial system and at the mercy of large banks and institutions — an ordeal that affects millions of people across the globe. In the summer of 2014, as the original Proton Mail crowdfunding campaign was in progress, Proton had a near-death experience when PayPal froze our funds(new window), questioned whether encryption was legal, and whether Proton had government approval to encrypt emails.
While i agree with Monero being the better and more private option, bitcoin still offers substantial benefits compared to being fully dependent on the traditional finance system. Just look at Wikileaks or GrapheneOS.
The people in this thread mostly seem to be western fully banked people with the legacy financial system working for them. Please also consider the billions of unbanked people and those in countries with highly volatile currencies that rely on bitcoin as a means of exit.
2 Likes
I’ve got a better idea of where Proton is going with this, thanks for sharing the article. Proton Wallet addresses a number of issues
Let me come back to the negative things I said about Proton
How does exactly Proton would force a vendor lockdown with a non custodial wallet?
Even if something happens to Proton Wallet, as long as you have your seed phrase, you can import your wallet elsewhere…
1 Like
I do not agree with this comparison at all. It is not about catching people. Banks report what you have to tax authorities so that people can be taxed according to their wealth. This helps rebalancing society. When cryptocurrencies become more a standard in our world we need to fix this. The other issue is of course that bitcoin offers zero privacy wheb it comes to transactions. If your identity is tied to it, everyone can see where you spend your money. This is a terrible idea.
But besides that. Do you gave the source for these stats? What is this based on? Confirmed cases?
Surely money laundering is terrible but bitcoin also allows basically everyone to evade taxes relatively easily. Note that that is not the same as money laundering
2 Likes
@non whats your point? Proton is just adding (true) value to their, already well-received and extremely well designed, suite of (real) privacy tools.
Truth is: noone is forcing you into using their wallet; dont want to/dont like it? No problem: either dont use wallet while keeping usage of rest of their suite, or just move on. Instead of complaining; or telling us how thy disappointed you.
Just move on.
@anon81355579 true. But, guess what? All the rest from Proton Suite is also very good 
The fact that you dont know how to properly configure port-forwarding in VPN, doesnt say their VPN is bad;
I was the one who upvoted their idea of wallet…
Thats what they do on daily basis.
@Lukas same here, but:
- BTC is not the only one coin out there,
- BTC is the most widely used one, and thus, I see no suprise in support for BTC landinhg in Proton Wallet first
4 Likes
I don’t have an issue with a cryptocurrency wallet (though since we’re all pimping our coin of choice in here, I prefer BCH), but if you’re going to advertise Bitcoin as a way to “bank the unbanked” as their blog post intro does, they’re going to have to get LN up and working. Fees on Bitcoin are far too high for normal transactional use, especially for folks who fall into the “unbanked” category or live in highly inflationary currency zones. That said, I understand that doing LN in a non-custodial way is much easier said than done for a service like Proton (hence why I prefer on-chain scaling and use BCH instead). Anyway, I hope that Proton have plans to extend to other coins and/or LN if they’re really serious about having a cryptocurrency wallet service.
As it is with BTC only and on-chain only, I don’t see it being useful. There are already plenty of good BTC (and other crypto) wallets out there. The integration with Protonmail is interesting, but it also seems like a privacy minefield. Perhaps integrate it with SimpleLogin too 
1 Like
Is it tax evasion? I have a Roth IRA, money that’s already been taxed but is invested long term for retirement. I don’t have to pay taxes on it when I pull it out because it’s money thats already been taxed, any crypto that you buy is ostensibly with income you’ve already paid tax on and so you’re in the same boat. Companies and the 1% have entire teams dedicated to dodging taxes on a regular basis and get viewed reverentially by segments of their user bases and clientele. What makes crypto worse than just taxing the rich and letting the common man try to get a more stable income.
3 Likes
There sure is a lot wrong on how companies are (not) taxed.
Does not make it that the more wealthier people should contribute more to society. This can only be done via wealth capping taxes. Accumulated assets will always need to be taxed based on current value each and every year not a one time fee.
2 Likes
This is straying a bit too close to politics for me so I’m out here on this
Idk why you’re assuming it’s just configured wrong. Their proposed renewal script workaround to their client not supporting it will say it’s working but doesn’t actually open the port. I suspect most people who think it does are torrenting, pop the port into the torrent client, and don’t realize all the peers they can’t connect to. A number of users have reported this. Regardless, people clearly are dissatisfied with various parts of the suite and would prefer larger teams getting the existing apps to feature parity with the competition instead of their money going to privacy-stripping social ills like this. My money is going toward this, THAT’S why I care.
I’m not sure what you have against paying customers expressing their dissatisfaction with the service. It’s not your job to protect a company from its customers, it’s their job to do better. I may cancel my service and move on, but there’s a lot of room between “I am perfectly satisfied” and “fuck this I’m out,” yknow?
1 Like
Because it works well OOTB…
Renewal? What would you like to renew?
how do you know it does not open the port? Have you tested it? If so than what was the software you have used to perform these tests?
Maybe true. Thats what bug tracker is or. If one is dissatisfied with sth, than just let Proton know by opening bug report. Simple as this.
Not yours, but OUR (Im also paying customer). And Im completely satisfied with where MY money went, what they have been spent on.
Completely nothing. Let them express their dissatisfaction. But there is whole world of difference betwen expressing dissatisfaction and spreading FUD (this is what you do).
Ah okay, you’re on a platform they care more to support if it works out of the box. Unfortunately we’re not so lucky in Linux land, we’re provided with a script to keep the port open which will happily report it’s doing so when it is not.
Criticism of lacking features and the widely discussed social and environmental implications of bitcoin is FUD? Come on…not everyone who disagrees with you is trying to tear down everything you love.
3 Likes
Im on macOS.
You mean while using cli or ui app?
Let me ask again: how do you know that script is NOT opening port? Any tests?
OFC not, but you sounded as if you were spreading baseless, one-sided, POVs.
And please, DONT put BTC in the same basket as here things are little bit different. Because cryptocurrencies (BTC in particular) is so popular that most of (90-95%) of times when you see BTC this or BTC that you can be sure this is pure scam.
The GUI, iirc the feature doesn’t even exist in the CLI (which yells at you not to run it headless, for some reason). Either that or it was the same issue. Yes, I’ve tested a number of applications that require an open port and do manage it through other VPNs. I don’t have logs to show you because I’m not trying to open a bug report, I’m expressing how bad the service has been for me and others I know who already quit. Even if it did work, a hacky script that doesn’t even recover if something goes wrong is not a good experience, I should be able to toggle an option in the GUI like other platforms do.
And of course it’s a one sided POV…I’m one person with one point of view by definition, not a journalist trying to summarize every side of the issue. I’ll go, though, if that’s “FUD”.