So much for my plan of looking into a Proton mail account.
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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Oh wow, they're hitting all the shitty gimmicks in one fell swoop!
Bitcoin isn't private, you can see how much BTC a sender or recipient is holding and what transactions they've made. I'd argue that without privacy mitigations such as a mixing service it's even less private than credit cards. They should have gone with Monero instead.
Does it need to be private?
I can't run my drug empire without privacy!
It's not supposed to be private. However it's very effective at being pseudo-anonymous
You can make as many Bitcoin addresses as you want. You can look up an addresses balance but not a wallet's balance. It's not as clear as you're making it sound.
Bitcoin over Lightning is much, much more opaque, and it's where the majority of Bitcoin transactions are now occurring. You can't look up somebody's balance. The only people who know about the transaction are you, the recipient, and any intermediary nodes used to forward the transaction. Privacy is continuing to improve on lightning and main chain.
It's open source, and it's fully self-custody which are two important features. Having a wallet directly integrated into the e-mail client is nice, being able to send payments to other users just knowing their e-mail address instead of their public key is pretty cool. It does automatic address rotation to preserve privacy. Wish it supported lightning for cheaper/faster transactions and additional privacy but hopefully that feature comes in time.
Checking with proton themself, the main reason seems to be to further resistance in case another instance of a issue they had in initial funding, where paypal blocked all payments to them. A wallet was also heavily requested by business users, and proton is using randomization to reduce tracking detailed on their site. So long as they next work on environmental impact to balance out this stuff, proton is fine still. Here is the code for the wallet: https://github.com/ProtonWallet
The reason they don't support Monero at the moment is due to a few reasons, one of those being, proton doesn't want to be a main support for illegal activity which means while they may adopt it eventually, they will be a late adopter. Proton is for privacy, not anonymity.
cringe. monero is basically the only viable cryptocurrency. the rest is just for gambling.
i am surprised they went with bitcoin and not a privacy focused coin like monero
Honestly, if they can prove they don't have access to the keys, I might use their wallet, but BTC doesn't interest me at all because fees are high and it fluctuates too much, making it useless as a currency, and Monero is the opposite in both regards.
they say in the post that they’d like to add support for more options in future so i’ll wait to see what they add. another fully open source wallet is always a good thing i guess.
It's a self-custody wallet and open source. It's regular main-chain BTC but it does automatic address rotation. Unfortunately it doesn't support lightning, which is where the majority of Bitcoin transactions occur. Lightning offers significantly increased privacy, sub-second transactions and fees measuring in pennies.
And honestly, that's fine. I'd like a secure store of value for moving funds from "savings" (e.g. BTC) to "checking" (e.g. Monero). BTC is easier to exchange w/ fiat, Monero is privacy-focused and I only want to use it for purchases anyway.
So honestly, them supporting lightning isn't particularly interesting to me. It seems Lightning has been cracked by the FBI, whereas Monero is likely still safe. If the FBI can do it, surely an interested third party can as well, and that's not great.
Based on most business readings, the idea that most transactions occur on lightning is kind of ridiculous. You see tons of businesses that accept both main chain and lightning published statistics every single month and lightning is extremely low adoption and is not increasing.
In the last two months, Nostr users alone (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 2.6 million tips (individual transactions) over Bitcoin lightning. In that same time period, Bitcoin main chain did around 20-40k. Most transactions are on lightning by number of transactions. Maybe not by total value moved, but lightning is pretty opaque and grants additional privacy, so it's hard to measure for that reason.
Lightning continues to grow and get upgrades (look up BOLT12 if you are curious about the latest upgrades which bring additional privacy enhancements).
Sure, but have a look at people actually using bitcoin or lightning to actually spend money on real goods and services such as at coin cards or cake pay or other services such as that and you will find that very very few people use lightning. Also, I am on Nostr promoting Monero. It is currently a Bitcoin safe haven but is slowly yielding to market forces as everywhere else is.
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