I just got access to Proton Wallet earlier today. Is there anything you’d like to know?
Q&A
- I’m on a family plan and have been a paying customer for about 2/3 years.
- I haven’t bought any Bitcoin yet but will report back on that once I have.
Signed up for decent encrypted email and now I feel like Proton’s only goal is to shove so much extra shit down my throat that they’ll choke me to death- and apparently I’m the only subscriber completely uninterested in any of it.
That’s fair. It has worked very well for me. Pass has been good too. I would probably use Calendar if they put more work into it, but it’s still missing quite a few features. Like others have mentioned, Wallet is a bit of a head-scratcher, but if it could compete with Apple/Google Wallet, I would try it out for sure.
I genuinely don’t get why they made a Bitcoin wallet, but all of their other services are direct competitors to (and imo much better than) the Google suite apps and made it much easier to de-google my life
De-Googling is great, keep at that.
That said, Totally investing in a single other provider may not be the answer.
Proton VPN, Proton Drive, Proton Pass, etc- none of these existed when I signed up but here they are. If anything I’d rather opt out of all the extra stuff for a discounted rate, but that’ll never happen.
If you just want Mail, there’s the Mail Plus plan, which is just the Mail (with a little bit of Drive for mail storage) and cheaper than the Unlimited plan. I see what you’re saying though. I’d like more customisable plans too. I use Drive and Mail, but don’t want the others and the Mail Plus plan doesn’t have enough for Drive (for my usecase), so I have to shell out for Unlimited.
My question is, on a scale of 1 to 10, whats your favourite color of the alphabet?
May i ask what country you live in?
I am very interested in how this runs in EU countries. Also the ease of use for absolute crypto noobs.
I’m in the EU. So far, it’s been really easy to follow everything. I made a €20 purchase (you get redirected to a third party, with two available to choose from) without any issues.
Did you have to verify your personal information in some official manner somehow?
Nope. The only time I entered personal information (my full name) was when purchasing bitcoin. I made the purchase through Ramp- one of the brokers you can buy from
I received my invite today as well (Portugal). Overall here are my first impressions:
- Interface is very clean, but lacks a Dark mode
- You can import wallets by seed phrase only
- Buying bitcoins redirects you to a broker’s website, it’s not as seemless as I’d like. They ask you for all sorts of personal information, which I guess is industry standard, but it’s a third party service
- I tried making a 50 euro purchase, but after a few hours I got an email saying it was canceled, no reason provided
- You can’t sign messages to confirm the ownership of your wallet, which is required by some brokers
- This service is marketed as exclusive to users in the Visionary plan. I’m in the Proton Unlimited plan. It’s unclear what’s going to happen to my wallet once this beta period is over. Am I going to lose access to my bitcoins? Some functionality? The Proton support just told me “Please be advised that Proton Wallet is only available for users on our Visionary plan at the moment”, which doesn’t fully clarify it.
I don’t see the point to this. All their other products seem to be targeted at replacing less private, non-E2EE services. Mail, calendar, VPN, and a password manager are excellent choices with no major well integrated E2EE solution. This, not so much.
Also, I don’t really get why they chose Bitcoin, it’s PoW and is much less energy efficient than other alternatives while also not being as private as Monero, nor having things like smart contracts.
If you want the answers to the questions you listed, then it’s pretty much covered in the privacy podcast called OptOut. Linked here if u wanted to have a listen.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1790481/15505787-proton-wallet-w-andy-yen.mp3