Dont go. Now, when you expressed yourself clearly, I see that I msjudged you. Im sorry for this.
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Henry put out an (initial reaction) video on the new producte, based on the intro I expected not to see eye to eye with him, but after watching it I think he makes some good points, and raises some good questions. I’m still open minded as to how this product may evolve in the future, but its disappointing to see what appears to be a bias against non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies, and a reluctance to support Monero, which is private-by-design in ways that Bitcoin is not.
I understand that their are real reputational and legal considerations that Proton has to consider that most of us probably don’t fully appreciate, but it is still disappointing to see a privacy-by-design company seemingly rule out all private-by-design cryptocurrencies.
offtopic
@henry-fisher (or @ whoever is responsible for editing/shownotes) one small request, when you reference something like a Reddit thread or comment, could you include a link/footnote in the shownotes so its easier for viewers to understand the context/learn more.
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Proton really screwed up on this one, we really didn’t need that Proton Wallet crap, which only accepts Bitcoin on top of that. I read on Reddit that they were also planning to release an alternative to Apple Pay and Google Pay, it’s really getting out of hand, they want to touch every sector and centralise everything via the Proton brand.
It’s time to look elsewhere…
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Although I love how much work Proton has been putting in to release all of these new and modern services for their customers, I do not understand why Monero was not the choice for this.
My initial criticism was that they should put their employees into working on existing services, but I hear that this new service actually has new employees, so the existing employees can continue working on the existing services, which is good.
Still, I think the time and money used to hiring new employees and getting new infastructure for Proton Wallet could have been used to better the existing services in some way. If Proton Wallet chose Monero, however, I would not see much of a problem with this. I just do not understand why Bitcoin was the choice.
The only reason I could think of is to attract a new customer base to Proton. This is an understandable business decision since it generates more money that can aid the company, but at the end of the day, the decision itself is not really privacy-oriented, making Proton somewhat stray from the privacy mission. Even if they had chose Monero for Proton Wallet, I would still not approve as much of this new service until they actually allowed Monero as a valid way of paying for Proton.
Still, I am excited for what else Proton has to offer. Conceptually, they could ideally add a virtual cards system to Proton Wallet like privacy.com and add fiat money like Apple/Google Pay. This is something I would be very interested in. It would go nicely with the Proton Pass cards selection. Though I see that there are other people who are not interested in this route.
All in all: I do not understand why Proton Wallet was even something to be considered in the first place. Secondly, I do not understand why Bitcoin was the chosen coin. Thirdly, I am still excited and somewhat optimistic about Proton’s future.
We should criticize Proton, but we should not abandon it. Otherwise, that makes room for other customer bases who are not privacy-oriented to replace us and we are back to square 1. We need to re-align Proton back into the privacy mission, not leave it. The future is amendable.
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That actually seems like a very positive thing (at least for Google users). Having at least one option that isn’t tied to Apple/Google seems pretty desirable.
I’m often critical of Proton’s mission creep, but I think private payments is something I would be excited to see Proton get involved in (more so than a Bitcoin or even a Monero wallet)
I believe GrapheneOS users for example not only lack a private option for smartphone wallet/payments, they lack even a non-private option. A 3rd party solution from Proton or others seems like it would have a lot of value in this context. On the other hand we would be deep into “all your eggs in one basket” if that comes to pass.
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I mean, when it comes to the existing services some things can’t be rushed. You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant,[1] right? 
They probably have the appropriate number of people working on new features across all their existing product lines. Introducing Proton Wallet – a safer way to hold Bitcoin - #28 by Proton_Team
unless you ask ChatGPT ↩︎
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Yes, I read that already as well:
but I hear that this new service actually has new employees, so the existing employees can continue working on the existing services, which is good.
I also agree that “some things can’t be rushed” to an extent, but my point is not that the other Proton services should be rushed. When a company creates a new service, time and money is spent on it regardless of if the “appropriate number of [employees]” are distributed.
I am not critical of Proton releasing new services for its customers, the point is that these new product teams are working on something that is not as relevant to Proton’s existing customer base. The main criticism is not that Proton is wasting resources, it is that it is spending resources on something to attract new types of customers that are more divergent to its existing customer base compared to the customers who were attracted to, say, Proton Pass or Proton Docs. So yes, they are not pulling from existing teams, but the Proton brand is arguably slowly turning into something else. Whether that be for the good or for the bad is what’s being considered here.
Still, I am amazed at how much Proton is pumping out new things, so this isn’t much of a big deal for me as I am sure they will still release more services in the future that aligns with us. But to be critical of myself, this hasn’t even been released publically to everyone, and there are probably more features coming to it. So idk.
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Tbh Lightning network would be private enough for a company like Proton.
Though, Bitcoin has failed its purpose and takes with it all other cryptocurrency projects like Monero etc.
Jackson Palmer cofounder of Dogecoin summarized it well enough 3 years ago https://archive.ph/ONrkM
So in other words that is a late fail move by Proton.
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His video is very loaded, he implies at the begining that Proton disregards Monero as a “shitcoin”, although they never did. Okay, he has some good points. But he didn’t mention that Proton give you new adress for each transaction, so this breaks a bit the tracability.
It seems like I missed this post since I am quite busy IRL. Not going to back read, maybe when I have free time.
But some of my sentiments:
At this point, have we asked whether cryptocurrency is even a net good to society? Somehow the entire cryptocurrency thing has been:
- a primary enabling factor in the proliferation of ransomware through their payments via cryptocurrency.
- a net increase in the energy consumption of the entire world just to waste computations on random math (as opposed to folding proteins). For some people, climate change isnt an issue, to the misfortune of those who do feel it everyday.
- massively enriching Nvidia, a GPU maker that once made good mining GPUs but doesnt want to make GPUs anymore (lol). They dont even like FOSS and has historically working to undermine it.
- GPU mining has enabled to pivot into ML, LLMs and AI. All these are currently scourging the employment of people around the world for the benefit of billionaires and venture capitalists.
So yeah, while I like Proton, pay for their services and will continue to pay for their services because they are behaving - forgive me for not being particularly excited for this one.
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Reading the responses from Proton in that video made me a little bit uncomfortable.
“We will not support shitcoins.”
“We will not associate ourselves with criminals.”
E2EE is definitely not used by criminals, but Monero is, right?
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- Make sense, and they NEVER said Monero was shitcoins.
- This is not the exact quote, but they did say that one issue with Monero is its use by criminals. Make sense to be concerned about your reputation when 100millions users rely on you, and your reputation, to stay up.
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Personally I don’t care that Monero is used by an extreme minority of criminals, that Proton refuses cash, Paypal, bank transfers and Bitcoin in this case, criminals also use this type of payment in much greater proportion.
Proton’s justification is simply an attempt to turn us upside down
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So how come Proton still accepts cash by mail? Cash is used by criminals.
Encryption is also used by criminals.
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Some more thoughts
(Text is mine but rewritten for structure by Duck.ai)
Clearing Up “Misconceptions” About Proton Wallet
There seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding the goal of Proton Wallet. Contrary to popular belief, the primary objective of Proton Wallet is not to provide an anonymous or extremely private wallet. Instead, it’s more about harm reduction compared to other digital wallets like Google Wallet or Apple Wallet.
In fact, the team behind Proton Wallet has expressed their desire to offer fiat payments if they could, but this requires a banking license. While many of us would have loved to see Monero support, it’s not necessarily a crucial aspect of Proton’s goal.
To better understand Proton’s approach to privacy, let’s consider Andy Wen’s analogy. Privacy isn’t about keeping your actions completely secret; it’s about keeping the details of those actions private. For instance, it’s not about hiding the fact that you visited a doctor, but rather keeping the contents of your conversation with the doctor confidential. Similarly, it’s not about hiding the fact that you’re in the bathroom, but rather keeping what you do in the bathroom private.
Applying this logic to Proton Wallet, it’s not about keeping the fact that you’ve purchased Bitcoin a secret. What matters is that others can’t know what you plan to do with that Bitcoin – will you hold it, spend it, and if so, what will you spend it on? With Proton’s unique address for each transaction, the wallet achieves this level of privacy.
Proton’s wallet impacts
This is very early to say but it’s very possible that Proton will have a big impact on the adoption of Bitcoin.After all, they have over 70 million users*. For context, there’s 106 million Bitcoin users. And when the test period is finished, they will allow anyone of these to create a bit coin wallet in 60 seconds. Then, just like you can send money directly in iMessage you will now be able to do the same with Proton Mail.
*There is “100m+” accounts, but I suspect many of those have 2 accounts.
Pratical details
Interesting bits : They use banxa.com(VPN hostile) and ramp.network to help users find marketplace to buy BTC from. Not sure about wheter KYC is required.
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They may want to do this (actually I want them to do this) but a Bitcoin Wallet (or a Monero wallet to be fair) doesn’t really help achieve that harm reduction (imo). That doesn’t mean there can’t be other reasons to support Bitcoin (attracting and onboarding a new group of users to Proton, promoting a censorship resistant payment method without intermediaries, using a digital currency that can be more private or more pseudonymous, than traditional payment methods etc) but I don’t think a cryptocurrency wallet (of which there are many already) offers an alternative for those invested in Google or Apple wallet/pay, the use-cases just don’t overlap very much. Some day maybe.
With Proton’s unique address for each transaction, the wallet achieves this level of privacy.
This isn’t a Proton specific feature. I’m a bit rusty on current Bitcoin norms, but when I was more involved pre-2017, my recollection is that unique addresses per transaction was already a best practice, and rather widely adopted.
I do think/agree that a lot of the time, in the Bitcoin vs Monero conversation, while Monero is objectively and meaningfully better with respect to privacy, people definitely tend to inflate and oversimplify the extent to which Bitcoin isn’t private. Bitcoin isn’t private in the same way that e-mail isn’t private, Its not private at the protocol level, which is a big advantage Monero has, but it is still a meaningfully improved option over most other traditional online payment methods, if you take steps or adopt strategies to use it privately.
Unfortunately so far it seems Proton is hesitant to build in some of these techniques for the same reason they are hesitant to add Monero (Legal and reputational harm–which are real concerns).
After reading Protons blog, I personally believe (or choose to extend the benefit of the doubt) that what Proton says, about adopting a conservative approach is earnest (and inline with past actions). It isn’t hard for me to believe that there hesitance to support Monero or build in a mixing service, is due at least in part to that conservatism and fear of both reputation and legal risks (for those who don’t follow the crypto world, this is a very precarious and uncertain moment in time for wallets that build in strong privacy features (see Samurai Wallet).
I think I’m adopting a “wait and see” approach with this. While I’m a bit perplexed and initially dismayed by the bitcoin only rollout, and somewhat dismissive/loaded language they used to justify it, I think there is a chance this could evolve over time into a useful thing that has comparative advantages over the status quo, (or it could be a let down/missed opportunity, time will tell).
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Finding out[1] who Proton chose to consult/work with on this project explains a lot about this rollout.
Pretty much exclusively Bitcoin maxis like Matt Odell who believe all other crypto is inferior. You can see who Proton Wallet follows on Twitter to get an idea of the type.
through my anonymous sources lol ↩︎
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Yes, it’s pretty clear that they are heavily influenced by Bitcoin maxis. They timed the announcement to coincide with the Bitcoin 2024 conference as well, which has such luminaries as Michael Saylor and Donald Trump as keynote speakers.
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Tbh, I believe this is a waste of time. What is the added value of this since there are hundreds of crypto wallets?
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Yeah, and not just influence, I mean like they literally wrote the docs for Proton, worked with them during development, helped with the release, etc. This is what I’m hearing from people talking to them at Bitcoin 2024 anyways.
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