I at least appreciate that the very first header is “Why build Proton Wallet?”.
Makes sense, a lot of alternatives are sketchy and I think many people don’t realise that Bitcoin transactions are by no means private by default.
Personally very glad to see them roll out this feature. Bitcoin offers pretty decent privacy out of the box, especially with lightning. Like using any technology, using it in a fully private and anonymous way requires some attention to detail. The ability to send/receive BTC from other users knowing only their e-mail address is pretty cool. And the self-custody element is critical.
This is the same “private” company which has been ignoring over 2000+ people’s votes for Monero support. It’s ironic how they are now making a cryptocurrency wallet for bitcoin.
The reason they don’t support Monero was adressed in a recent podcast “OptOut” with the CEO of Proton.
TLDR; they fear the biggest companies for auditing their finances, won’t work with them if they do. Which is reasonable, they are a business after all.
Cool experiment - But why released an unpolished product? This is a weird trend, like ya’ll went from developing like snails (still waiting on Proton Calendar for iPadOS) to releasing new expansions faster than even the most micro-transaction hungry video game developers. Docs, Scribe (which a lot of AI skeptics are still getting a hang of, deeply appreciated but AI-branding x black box data usage takes some getting used to. Also not a new product, more an expansion for email) and now… a Bitcoin Wallet?
Very cool but since the norm for Google-centered users/digital citizens is a (perhaps illusory) degree of separation of personal and financial organization, having it as part of the Proton Suite instead of a well-integrated but separate service (or for the option to be like Scribe) is a hard pill to swallow (especially since it’s Bitcoin).
What the hell is Proton’s direction?
I didn’t really care about Scribe but this is just so off-brand. Just what.
Imo after reading it, it doesn’t seem that crazy or off-brand anymore (so long as it gets fleshed out to use something not as transactionally-inefficient as bitcoin).
They said in the Reddit post that further down the road they want to implement something like Google wallet, and possibly proton pay, that would allow for credit card aliases. I think the Bitcoin solution is the one they chose to build a new platform/foundation but without all the regulation and partnerships hassle of making it for traditional payment systems.
Edit
I wish I could use it
What a terrible, stupid, and useless idea.
Uhmm can we got Proton Drive for Linux first please??
Or make it work properly on Mac?
What are the issues on Mac?
I tried transferring from iCloud to the drive and lost a lot of files. Granted I should have been smarter, and cloud to cloud might not be a good idea. I get errors often when trying to save things to it, although often it actually worked, so I don’t know why I get the error.
Can we please get full parity between the webapps and the native apps on iOS? The damn calendar widget on iOS?
