Proton isn’t reinventing the wheel with this crypto wallet. But it’s another solid option for people looking to create a crypto wallet for the first time. However, cryptocurrencies tend to be a polarizing topic, so let’s see if Proton Wallet doesn’t hurt Proton’s brand image in the future.
- More information: Proton Blog Article
But… Why? Who asked for this? Instead of stuff like this, can we get feature parity with at least the Android app when it comes to the Linux VPN app?
Why do you need a VPN app? Using wg-quick from the command-line on Linux is dead-simple. I’ve hated every VPN app I’ve used, but I don’t hate wg-quick. Take advantage of WireGuard support being baked into the kernel. :)
Seems like Proton is branching out into a lot of new areas lately. Possibly too many? I’d prefer it if they’d work on improving their current offerings first…
I don’t think doing this means they aren’t working on their other offerings. Both Drive and Pass have recieved very highly requested features in the past couple weeks.
The problem is that all of these new products take a LOT of time, money, and dev resources. Those are all a limited supply. There are super duper basic Calendar features that they could be working on instead.
Wow excuse my zoomer language but… Who asked?
It makes sense if you look at their broader offering. They’re basically building alternatives to Google products, and this seems to be an analogue to Google Wallet, but with crypto instead of credit cards.
It’s a really low-cost way to add services to your suite. There are tons of FOSS crypto wallets out there, so it’s basically just copy paste, audit, integrate, and ship.
lol bitcoin
Right, Monero is the big player these days
so stupid how monero, the only useful crypto, gets hated to oblivion for no reason
The more I hear about Monero, the bigger of a scam it seems
How so?
It’s the closest you can get to digital cash. It’s untraceable, has very low transaction costs (a few cents), and it’s mining-resistant (so no big mining farms). It’s not popular for speculation, so the price tends to be pretty stable (has been pretty flat for 2 years now), at least related to other coins. I honestly haven’t seen many scams around it, probably because it’s a tough sell to get someone to “invest” (it’s never going “to the moon”).
If you are looking for a digital alternative to cash, Monero is it. The main problem with it is due to its main benefit: governments don’t like it because it’s untraceable, and because it’s untraceable, it’s often used for illegal activity. So you can’t buy it directly in many areas due to gov’t regulations, but you can usually trade another cryptocurrency for it (e.g. Bitcoin), but you should do it in relatively large transactions because BTC fees can be steep (as in, $1-2 fees, so convert >$100 at a time).
People don’t advocate for it because they’re looking to get rich, they’re advocating for it because they want more options to spend their Monero, and the more people that use it, the more stores will accept it.
Monero is great for covering yer tracks, for sure!
Yup, just like cash, because that’s what it’s trying to be. It’s as close to digital cash as you can get: untraceable, stable, low transaction fees.
I don’t have any yet and have never used it, but if I use crypto I think Monero is what I would do.
Same. I recently set up a wallet, but haven’t gotten around to funding it yet. Some sites have discounts for using Monero, such as https://based.win (run by YouTuber Mental Outlaw, who’s big into privacy and cyber-security), and I’ve thought about buying something from him w/ Monero to support him.
I really didn’t see anyone asking for this, hopefully it didn’t take too many resources to create. Even though I don’t understand it being made I’ll probably still switch to it, because Exodus feels like it’s getting more and more bloated and annoying to use.
edit: I just realized this wallet only seems to support bitcoin? Why on earth would they do that? Most people holding a significant amount of Bitcoin are storing it in a hardware wallet and rarely transferring it. It sucks to use for actual transactions.
Minimal Viable Product. They shiped it with only one coin to avoid having to spend too much time on implementing every possible coin protocol. But they says that they will add more of them in the future, and, maybe, even fiat currencies.
Why must companies feel like they need to be everything to everyone? Proton would be absolutely awesome if it stuck to it’s “We’re better than GMail” plan and provided stellar email and calendar.
Leave the VPN and cryptowallets and all that “not email related” crap to it’s own app/company/environment.
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Eh, having a more complete package is how you defeat Gmail. People don’t use Gmail because Gmail rocks, they use it because of all the other crap it comes with, like Google Drive and Calendar. So at a minimum, they should provide those with their email. But a lot of customers want VPN, and they already have a bunch of server infra for email and calendar, so why not add VPN?
If you look at their product stack, it reads like a set of alternatives to gsuite. Here are some less obvious ones:
- Pass - alternative to Google single sign-on
- Wallet - crypto alternative to Google Wallet
- VPN - Google One VPN
If they follow this trend, they’ll make privacy-friendly alternatives to Meet and Gemini (Scribe AI?). Maybe eventually they’ll build/integrate an office suite to compete with Docs and Sheets (maybe OnlyOffice or Collabora).
They want to be privacy-friendly Google, building replacements for anything that can be self-sufficient (i.e. can be sold at a profit).
You know, people are mad at this for some reason, but while I don’t see myself using this ever, I’m really glad a more privacy conscious alternative to the google ecosystem is growing.(Even if this product of theirs doesn’t compete with them, many others do)
The reason people are mad with this is because Proton’s longstanding services are lacking basic features for months and years already with no update in sight, and in less than a month after a (now) controversial poll, Proton introduces AI and crypto wallet in their portfolio.
Genuinely wondering, what features are you talking about? Proton has a page for voting for features, and I definitely see highly voted ones get added.
Linux client is the biggest one I’m waiting for, but AFAIK they’ve said it’s planned, and I appreciate the support for Rclone in the meantime.
I could go on and on about those features on that page that are there for ages, but one struck me hard in the last hour: I tried cancelling my subscription, and after clicking on 6 “I’m sure” buttons and writing a reason why, I couldn’t cancel because I was using too much storage (3GB, free accounts have a 500MB limit). I deleted everything on my Drive and emptied the trash, tried again, no success. Deleted all my emails and emptied the trash, still failed. Deleted everything on Calendar and Pass, nothing. Couldn’t find anywhere how to contact support. There’s a small bar that shows how much storage I’m using, one would expect that clicking on it would show a summary of what’s using your storage, but all it does is show a popup with Proton’s subscription plans.
I can’t cancel my subscription because they don’t have the basic functionality of a storage usage summary.
Hmm… Is that a problem with their more recent endeavors? I myself have only used their email and pasword manager services and I find their feature sets to be sufficient.
Also, marketing containig the letters “A” and “I” does not invalidate the product. While I absolutely despise seeing AI plastered everywhere, it is true that ML algorithms are often incredibly useful (even if LLMs aren’t)
They’ve made a poll that had questions about AI, but no clear options to indicate that you don’t want anything to deal with AI. From the results, less than 20% of the voters signalled that they wanted an AI offering from Proton, those being business users, and less than a month later Proton introduces (to business accounts at the moment) a LLM that writes email for you (that has to decrypt and read plain text the emails that were supposed to be stored with zero access encryption), and it uses a model that was trained on copyrighted data without permission.
Not even two weeks later they come up with this crypto wallet, and both endeavours are on two very sensitive and controversial topics, to a point it seems Proton is “selling out” to techbros.
All the while, you can’t even create or edit folders and labels on their mail mobile apps.
Fair enough. I sure hope that “business” feature stays business-only or opti-in.
In a way I get it since from my experience the C-suites really like not writing their emails themselves so this is their way of trying not to lose existing corporate customers, however I do see how their lack of transparency is concerning.
The entire way that Proton introduced the Proton Scribe seemed very shady. Usually Proton would go on and on about transparency and all that, but with Scribe it just seemed very off, like they were purposefully avoiding talking about the thing in question.
On the Reddit post about the bitcoin wallet, Proton team is also avoiding replying to most negative constructive comments about it, and the very few that they did reply to are just trying to justify the walletand LLM because “banks have crypto ETFs”, “other companies have implemented AI” and my favourite “one shouldn’t confuse Bitcoin with “crypto””.
Proton is acting in a shady way with these two controversial services that seemed to appear into thin air on how quick they released those. I cannot see myself using Proton’s products anymore and while trying (fighting) to cancel my subscription, I can see some dark patterns that try to prevent you from doing it, or trying to upsell you something.
Oh and by the way, Hylics is such a great game
The product was an LLM.
Oh, ok my bad 😅
It kind of does compete with Google Wallet, just with crypto instead of credit cards. It’s low hanging fruit to add an analogue to a Google service on their platform.
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I used to use Bitcoin core for my wallet. But the block chain is just too huge to really make that feasible nowadays. (Also I don’t own any crypto now.)
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Possession of any cryptocurrency should be punished by 5 years in prison. The only use case is paying ransoms to North Korea, and the side effects are destroying our climate
