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.
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.
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.