Seth from the Opt Out podcast had a talk with Andy Yen about Proton Wallet, I’m about half way through right now and Andy’s answers are quite…interesting.
23:06 Monero support in Proton Wallet
48:57 accepting Monero to pay for Proton services
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I haven’t listened to it yet but I have a question.
My need or requirement is that I want to be a me to purchase, store, and use Monero with Proton without significant KYC needs.
Is this possible or will ever be a thing?
Is this even a good way to have Proton do Monero? I’m less than a novice with crypto so I have no idea what’s what and how.
Proton does not support Monero in any form.
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Feel like this could have stayed in the same thread
It seems they give more nuanced and better explanation here. It’s a putty they did not put this in the blog posts at launch.
I do miss something on the analogy with email tho. When they introduced proton mail it added privacy from day one. The way they set it up now does kot add anything (yet).
Also had no idea monero had such bad reputation. I think bitcoin still has more that issue in the public opinion.
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Can you explain why Monero is causing problems and won’t be integrated if you like?
Two possible reasons I can imagine:
- Proton is afraid of getting in trouble with the government if they allow anonymous payments with Monero - whether that’s justified or not I don’t know
- The guys that advised them for the Wallet are Bitcoin maxis
I’m not saying that’s what happened, just speculation.
It’s explained at the end of interview at the timestamp @jonah shared. It’s a reasonable enough explanation. I haven’t gone to fact check with Swiss law but the reputational damage of Andy Yen lying during an interview is enough of a reason for me to believe the argument at face value.
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Form the interview:
[Andy Yen] “Proton is a Swiss company and Swiss companies above a certain size have to undergo what is known as a mandatory legal audit and to get a legal audit done you need to find an auditing company that is willing to run your full audit and generally because Proton is a bigger company that is more credible in many ways we try to go with one of the big four accounting firms right so actually it’s public information because it’s on the Geneva registered to Commerce but actually you know we use PWC as our auditor and the thing about big four auditing firms is they are pretty wary of crypto in general and to pass your audit you need to have very good Revenue recognition because it’s something that you have to do properly so already the fact that we accept Bitcoin has made it so that certain Auditors refuse to work with us and the worry that we have is you know if we do Monero that may further limit the Auditors that are willing and able to work with us and at some point you know that poses a problem for us from a legal standpoint because we required to get an audit and we want to get an audit from a reputable firm so it’s yeah I hate to say it right but Monero has a reputational problem that needs to be let’s say separately addressed first before it can gain more widespread acceptance because for a lot of companies there are real business reasons why they are simply unable to do it”
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But then why do all this bitcoin stuff if it hurts their reputation and doesn’t provide any privacy benefits, AND will not have huge appeal to people outside the cryptocurrency crowd?
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They had it in development before the samouri wallet stuff happened and had been developing a blender for the coins. Now with the legal situation of coin cleaning i guess in question theyre withholding that feature but pressed forward with the release without it for now.
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The audit thing might make sense for accepting payments in Monero, but I don’t see how it has anything to do with adding the code to support Monero in their wallet app.
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I think it doesn’t, in the interview it was only brought up with the question of why they don’t accept payments with monero
Not sure if I buy the argumentation regarding XMR payment and big four auditing. I am unfamiliar with the situation in Switzerland but as far as I remember, Surfshark used to accept XMR and was also audited by the big four. I guess it depends on the type of audit, as Surfshark underwent a no-log or security audit instead of a legal audit. Would be nice to know if there are any other companies that accept XMR and underwent a legal audit by the big four. Just thinking out loud…
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I personally think proton should have held off on releasing wallet all together. After hearing Andy Yen’s explanation, I still think they should have waited few more of these months they are already waiting to improve it and make it a little more completed product.
I can see few people are confusing different types of audits. Andy said “legal audit” but I assume he meant, accounting audit of their financial statements. Which means taxes. Once Taxes dues are involved, governments take things very seriously.
From this, I am assuming, reason revenue recognition is an issue, is due to volatility when doing Crypto to Fiat conversions. Since prices often have large shifts, it may either be over or under values their recorded numbers for revenue that proton may have recognized in their financial statements, depending on how they are managing these crypto currencies, weather these are kept in crypto or converted to fiat.
In simpler words, if a third party audit firm can’t say these B number of crypto coins are valued at n in fiat, with reasonable certainty, it becomes an issue. Specifically issue of how much money company made and in the same thread, how much taxes government is due.
Hope this clarifies the issue further.
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This is exactly my thinking. They listed a bunch of reasons why they shouldn’t have done this at all when asked about support for other coins. And really…why do it? They haven’t figured out a way to do LN in a sufficiently non-custodial way (good luck with that), which means their wallet is functionally useless. They also mention the problems with XMR’s legal unfriendliness due to its privacy and point to similar questions about Bitcoin privacy tools, but also claim that they are working on implementing them. Why do they think they’ll be able to implement tools that they currently believe to be illegal?
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"Would be nice to know if there are any other companies that accept XMR and underwent a legal audit by the big four. "
Great question. I’ll actually ask some friends who work there… will report back if anything interesting comes up.
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@sgp may know, as he is a well-known and old figure in the Monero project.
The audit Proton mentions with big four consultancy companies is a kind of audit about legal processes, in particular if financial records and processes are appropriate.
Even though I believe in XMR from the privacy point, it is well known that it has a very bad reputation, because it is used by drug cartels and criminals for money laundering.
What I don’t know if there is or can be a real statistical figure/evidence about what percentage of users are criminals/normal users since I don’t delve in to the XMR structure.
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The audit Proton mentions with big four consultancy companies is a kind of audit about legal processes, in particular if financial records and processes are appropriate.
I know, which is why I asked about any other companies that accept XMR payments and have undergone a legal audit by one of the Big Four. The primary issue is that most of these legal audits are not made accessible to the public.