Proton, the Swiss creators of privacy-focused products like Proton Mail and ProtonVPN, recently released the latest product in their ever-growing lineup: Proton Wallet. Announced at the end of July 2024, it promotes itself as “an easy-to-use, self-custodial” Bitcoin wallet that will ostensibly make financial freedom more attainable for everyone.
It may well be that Proton Wallet is the easiest way to start using Bitcoin, but is a Bitcoin wallet the solution people need to improve their financial privacy?
Contrary to popular belief, cryptocurrency is not an inherently private transactional system.
Had Proton Wallet added support for Monero or a similarly private cryptocurrency, they could have single-handedly boosted a financial system that is actually private by default by a significant degree. In my eyes, failing to do so in favor of the market leader is an unfortunate step back from their “privacy by default” mantra.
Proton Wallet seems like a product that doesn’t know its own place in the world.
Is it meant to save us from the tyranny of payment processors like PayPal who can freeze your funds at a whim?
Or, was Bitcoin chosen to give us independence from fiat currency, including stablecoins, entirely?
However, if Proton Wallet wasn’t meant for all that, if it was simply meant to bring privacy to Bitcoin, then it’s certainly a failure.
Proton hasn’t taken any risks with this product, meaning it’s really only good for satisfying a singular belief: That Bitcoin is just inherently good, and anything to promote Bitcoin is inherently good as well. I don’t share these fanatical beliefs of Bitcoin maximalists, however, when Bitcoin is demonstrably lacking in a wide variety of ways.
Personally, I’m a bit of a cryptocurrency pessimist in general, but I can see some appeal for the technology in very specific areas. Unfortunately, Proton Wallet doesn’t seem to fit in to a useful niche in any meaningful way. The functionality it does support is extremely basic, even by Bitcoin standards, and it simply doesn’t provide enough value over the existing marketplace.
If you’re an existing Proton user simply looking for a place to store some Bitcoin you already have sitting around, Proton Wallet might be perfectly adequate. For everyone else, I don’t see this product being too useful. Bitcoin is still far too volatile to be a solid investment or used as a safe store of value if you crave financial independence and sovereignty, and Proton Wallet simply isn’t adequate for paying for things privately online.
It feels like Proton has lost touch with reality. Their core products are stagnant and unpolished while they keep adding new services. Then they add a Bitcoin wallet and start cracking jokes about shitcoins. When there’s backlash from paying users, their volunteer mods demand civility, ie stop criticizing Proton.
I’m probably not going to leave Proton any time soon because the move from Google products was exhausting. But I have completely lost faith in the company and am on the lookout for an alternative.
I would recommend you this interview with the CEO of Proton regarding Proton wallet, AI and more. Opt Out Podcast - with the CEO of Proton
Timestamps regarding specifics:
- 0:00+ About Proton Wallet and Bitcoin
- 45:45 Amount of releases
- 49:00 Why not Monero as Payment for Proton product’s
I’ve only had time to listen to the first 10ish minutes. I can follow his reasoning but I just don’t buy it. If payment options outside normal channels were so important why did they wait almost a decade? The framing of the issue with PayPal feels disingenuous too because there is/was a lot of crowd funding fraud. PayPal asked legitimate questions about the nature of the campaign and then quickly unlocked the account.
It also feels disingenuous because it’s not like Proton is going to ignore the laws. If a government legally asks for information they will turn it over. The same is true for money. So if Proton is in a position where banks are shutting down payments Proton has bigger problems. In fact, creating a wallet is going to cause more headaches for all Proton users. It already has a reputation as being used by bad actors and that belief* is being reinforced by having a built* in bitcoin wallet.
Yep, I got a post deleted by a mod here who also is a mod on Reddit. I was criticizing Proton, but they removed it for “trolling”. I messaged them explaining it was not trolling and asked politely for an explanation, but got no response.
Pretty sad and ironic that Proton needs to censor criticism like this.
they should’ve focused more on mail drive and vpn. and office suite
get off the AI hype train now Proton
don’t get too distracted from your intent Proton
… What? The entire post and article are about the crypto wallet they made, it doesn’t even mention AI. They did sort of go into AI with proton scribe (llm model for writing/proofreading emails) but that’s completely separate from this post and article.
Side note, they’re still working on mail, drive, VPN, and their office suite apps. Their proton docs got real time collab earlier in the year iirc. They have different teams doing different things, wallet was a bad decision and a waste of time and resources, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t doing other things too
I don’t think they lost touch. They said they wanted to do something like privacy.com for credit card aliases, and I think crypto currencies are a way for them to get the infrastructure up and running without having to deal with the legal and expensive licensing stuff that comes with handling real credit cards
They said they made Wallet because they nearly got shut down by PayPal in 2014
And they plan on implementing more privacy features but they also need audits as a company and many reputable Swiss companies don’t want to engage with crypto companies so that’s why they are careful with it
They weren’t almost shut down by PayPal. Their account was frozen for a short period of time while PayPal figured out who the hell they were and why tens of thousands of dollars were being sent their way during the crowdfunding campaign. PayPal did their due diligence and then unfroze the account. Completely normal.
If wallet was really about keeping Proton safe from banks/PayPal messing with payments then why did they wait almost a decade? It doesn’t make sense to me.
PayPal did their due diligence and then unfroze the account. Completely normal.
Sorry, no, it’s not “completely normal” to freeze an account for weeks without any recourse or communication and then be like “all good I guess”.
You could easily break a company doing just that. It really fucking sucks and should never happen.
I guess companies only work on one project at a time. Noted.