Proton Now Has a Bitcoin Wallet

What we're begging for: A Linux client for Proton Drive
What we get: A fucking Bitcoin wallet
- Im about to get my pitchforks out over it man.
- I want to be able to print my calendar!
- Even on Windows, Proton drive is hot garbage. It never syncs my files correctly. Has a tendency to leave half encrypted uploads just lying around. Eating up desk space.
  Don't even get me started on how long it takes to upload anything. Got a 1 GB file? Good luck!
  And that's before getting into the fact that it's proton's third product. It was announced in 2019. 5 years and they still don't have proton drive as a working product.
  Another gripe I have is that the Linux VPN client still doesn't support wireguard. Sure, you can download wireguard configuration files. And they work just fine. But changing servers is a pain in the ass because of it.
  It's made me seriously consider dropping my visionary plan and moving to a more competent provider.
  That being said, proton mail has been fantastic. And I have a ton of domains on it. So it would be a pain to move. I guess I'm just in a stalemate.
  
  Good to know. I've only been using Proton for like 4 months now and have thus far generally liked the experience, but that's too bad about your experiences with the Drive client. I've used several paid business suites over the years through work and they all have their issues though. The only one that was generally solid was Google's and I've gradually taken steps to remove their products from my life so there's no going back to them for me. It was also almost 10 years ago since I last used Google's paid email/Drive, so maybe it's also gone to shit.
- does rclone not work?
  
  I've actually meant to try that but haven't yet gotten around to it. I'd still love an official app though, as sometimes 3rd party solutions don't work great with cloud storage (at least in my experience).

I’m upvoting because this is good relevant information, but man I wanted to downvote. How awful.
- I'm petty enough to downvote anything remotely endorsing shitcoin, this one's for you 🤝

It seems everyone here think an organization can't have multiple teams working in more than one thing at the same time
- That assumes dev resources are limitless. And for a company the size of proton that’s certainly not true.
  They can only have X amount of devs. So how they allocate them says a lot.
  Also given that most complaints I’ve seen at the top are about specific missing features for ages, I think it’s safe they’re putting their eggs into too many baskets.
- That would make too much sense, something in short supply in companies these days.

what? why?? there are so many open source options already???
- This and the new LLM "feature" in ProtonMail suggests that someone higher up has had a sniff of the techbro kool-aid.
  
  Yeah. Part of what I get for paying is the Bridge app so I can use Thunderbird instead of the website. I don’t want or need the LLM thing.
- Are there any that are cloud-hosted, secure, and private? My experience is limited, but I've never found an easy way in. I can't imagine anyone who's not tech-savvy getting started without walking through a minefield of scams.
  Every now and then I look at options for how I might actually use crypto, and everything looks either outrageously scammy or way too much trouble. Pretty much every exchange I've looked at holds the keys to your account, and several have gone under or outright stolen their users' funds.
  The question is, when Proton embraces bitcoin, should it make me trust bitcoin more, or trust Proton less? I don't know. I'm still skeptical. Their blog post is interesting, but also doesn't answer a lot of questions. https://proton.me/blog/proton-wallet-launch
  I mean, look at this:
  Buy Bitcoin securely in 150+ countries
  If you are new to Bitcoin, Proton Wallet also has integrations that make it easy to buy Bitcoin in 150+ countries, and we have also put together a comprehensive Bitcoin guide for newcomers.
  That "comprehensive" guide spends three paragraphs talking about the "Blocksize War", and makes absolutely no mention of how a user can actually buy bitcoin using Proton Wallet. WTF, Proton? Who is your target audience here exactly?
  
  cloud-hosted, secure, and private
  Until homeomorphic encryption becomes a thing, cloud can't be secure or private.
  every exchange I've looked at holds the keys to your account
  Exchanges, are not wallets. You're supposed to move the coins out of the exchange for safekeeping. If you can't, then it's not a crypto exchange, it's an ETF peddler.
  how a user can actually buy bitcoin using Proton Wallet.
  Wallets, are not exchanges. They can link to exchanges, like Metamask does, but their core function is to hold your keys.

Funny how the free plan is not receiving any of the recently announced trash, making it more attractive than the paid options.

I like Proton and I guess this kind of makes sense for them, sort of, but its weird.

Enshittification hitting hard

Smart move for any liberated, international organization. Esp as inflation continues to impoverish people. Move into the future.
- Bitcoin's value is significantly more volatile than the US Dollar.
  
  Not to mention the obscene fees with using it. Crypto is rife with issues.
  
  Volatile means that in the short term, some may win, and some may lose.
  The multi-year trend though, still beats inflation hands down.
- I… can’t tell if this is sarcasm?
  
  I don't think it is.

- Having experienced firsthand the unreliability of the traditional financial sector
  Under very specific circumstances that no user could possibly come across on their own
  Incredible the lengths people go to to justify their shit.

Proton and all they do was always an obvious attempt at making money off of non tech people that care about their privacy but dont know what to do.Their stuff might be free now but from how much vendor lock-in they are building into their software its quite obvious to me.
Their services are counter to all the best practices of security by design. If they spent all this time on improving existing secure systems and making them more user friendly they would have a much more positive impact.
- Do you mind expanding on this? I recently moved away from Gmail to Proton in an attempt to be more privacy conscious and don't really know of any alternatives. Even at a paid tier I only use Proton for their email services.
  I would say I'm generally tech savvy but new to the whole privacy space. What better alternatives are there?
  
  Just use any other email provider that works for you and use standard OpenPGP to encrypt your emails. This is how email end to end encryption (e2ee) usually works.
  As long as the emails are properly e2ee, no email provider is "more private" than others. They can always see who your are emailing and when. Proton is still forced to give out all your metadata to the cops just like any other service.
  Also if whoever you are emailing isnt using protonmail, or another PGP compatible client, then your emails arent actually encrypted at all. For work emails the other party usually wont be using any of that so there is no point, for personal stuff i would honestly use standard messengers that have encryption built in like matrix, signal, session.
  If you want e2ee email tho, then on desktop Thunderbird has all the OpenPGP stuff built in and for mobile there is the K9-Mail client that can be coupled with the openkeychain plugin to offer encryption.
  There are also things like DeltaChat that allow you to use email in an instant messaging style format while using the same encryption keys that you use for standard emails. But tbh thats not what email is intended for, i would just use matrix for that.
  Protonmail is a decent attempt at offering "easy to use" encryption but by doing so, makes it overly complex from a software security and compatibility standpoint.
  With e2ee you want to have the absolute minimum level of complexity and code to make it easy to audit and understand. PGP has been the standard implementation for email encryption for decades. Any attempt to "expand" on this by implementing fancy web based shenanigans undermines the simplicity and inter compatibility of the preexisting email encryption ecoystem that everyone has been using.

Bit by bit Proton is slowly becoming Brave

Instead of focusing efforts into maintaining and improving their current products, of which many lack basic features, Proton decides to (in less than a month it seems) expand their portfolio into crypto bro and AI grifter territory.
I was already quite annoyed and unhappy with Proton's services lacking things and the steep price (13€ a month and I can't even use unlimited addresses for my custom domain), but this is the last straw. Fortunately I was already planning to move out so I'm able to just set everything up tomorrow and be done with it. I'm planning to get Migadu's micro plan, move back to Bitwarden and get that Hetzner 1TB StorageShare, the three combined will be cheaper than 13€ a month and I'll be getting more bang for my buck

It starts with a Bitcoin wallet. Cryptofication is just another flavour of Enshitification. They could of at least used a crypto that is more energy efficient than Bitcoin not that there is really any green cryptos in the first place.

Ah, timely as ever, really riding that crypto hype
At least they're not launching their own token ~~yet~~