Proton Wallet Review: Is Proton Losing Touch? - Privacy Guides

Technology@lemmy.world – 71 points – 2 months ago

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.

You neglected to quote the most relevant part of the article which answers your own question regarding Monero:

Proton Wallet is in a strange position. I've spoken to a few sources who suggest that privacy features like CoinJoin, which can mix Bitcoin in order to better anonymize transactions, were intended to be included at launch. The crackdown on the ill-fated Samouri Wallet project by U.S. authorities last April certainly put a damper on privacy in the Bitcoin space, and likely made Proton wary of introducing such features to the public.

Proton suggests this themselves, stating on their website:

"Coinjoin is considered the best solution for improving blockchain privacy. It works by mixing your BTC with other users’ BTC in a collaborative self-custodial transaction where you get back the same amount of BTC that you put in but on a different address that cannot be easily linked to your previous address. However, in 2024, in what many consider to be a regulatory overreach and attack on privacy, some of these Coinjoin services have been declared illegal in the US and EU. The future of financial privacy may therefore be decided by ongoing litigation in the next decade and privacy advocates should support these efforts."

This situation likely soured Proton on other privacy-friendly cryptocurrencies like Monero as well. I get it, financial privacy is an extremely challenging task for any company to take on. We can't expect Proton to take on the risk of offering a completely anonymous payment service in the current legal climate, but it begs the question: why enter the financial space at all?

While not particularly revolutionary, the fact that they provide a unique HD wallet address every time you receive funds through your same email address does provide additional privacy as no one can see your previous transactions. Even when those are rolled up together later it does make it harder to associate an exact total balance with you. If you used your wallet for smaller spending rather than making a single large send from it, that makes it harder still.

Sure, I would have liked them to add Monero too, but it gets thorny when you're a regulated company dealing with that.

And yet we still ain't getting proper phone contacts integration app

Or Linux Drive...

Third class citizens ain't a priority

cries

Proton AG is also a pretty small company and has not a lot of programming resources, can't expect them to magically support everything immediately when their goal is getting marketshare.

Aint Encrypted contacts integration most requested feature?

Who asked for pasword manager, crypto wallet and AI?

I just want to be able to set alarms with their calendar app (where it currently only sends notifications).

Set the notification sound to something alarming?
In all seriousness, that is pretty frustrating.

I was referencing the "no linux app" complaint. Yes the rest of the stuff is pretty fluffy, but it at least looks good to the general public who might be shopping.

The fact they are a small resource makes me think mistakes will be made. It’s all well and good to combine code by others to make this work. But it’s so easy to mess up in the final product unless they make a lot of effort and also allow outsiders to check out what they are doing internally.

I personally would not use them for sensitive or illegal transactions until much later after others use it a lot

i'd think at this point it's been proven that any resource, small or large, can and will be compromised. Proton so far has had a better track record than many.

Yeah, this is what I came here to say. I bet a large % of their users are linux users. I ended up just getting one drive instead of proton, but would have considered proton drive if they had a linux client.

I just want that popup tooltip thing to stop blocking the most important part of the UI when I delete a message in Proton Mail... That's something obvious and should take 15 minutes to half an hour of a decent dev's time.

I'm really appalled by how bad Proton's project management is.

Is it meant to save us from the tyranny of payment processors like PayPal who can freeze your funds at a whim?

Wasn't this quite literally the the reason provided in Proton's announcement of Wallet?

Why build Proton Wallet?

Early in our journey, we experienced first-hand what it’s like being cut off from the financial system and at the mercy of large banks and institutions — an ordeal that affects millions of people across the globe. In the summer of 2014, as the original Proton Mail crowdfunding campaign was in progress, Proton had a near-death experience when PayPal froze our funds(new window), questioned whether encryption was legal, and whether Proton had government approval to encrypt emails.

Fortunately, in that instance PayPal returned the blocked funds, and Proton was able to start the journey that we’ve been on for the past decade. However, that dangerous moment has always stayed in our minds, and we still keep a proportion of Proton’s financial reserves in Bitcoin.

Having experienced firsthand the unreliability of the traditional financial sector, building Proton Wallet is an important strategic move to make Proton more resilient and independent in the future. By enabling us and the entire Proton community to more easily adopt means of payment that deliver on the promise of financial freedom for all, we better insulate Proton from the risks posed by traditional finance.

Yeah, monero would have been a much better choice.

Exactly. If Proton does anything with cryptocurrency, it should use one of the privacy coins, and Monero is probably the best option here. Here's how I would've rolled it out:

accept Monero w/ a discount directly as payment for Proton - I might have picked Proton over Tuta for this
add Monero payments to Proton Pass
integrate 2 into existing products (e.g. send money to trusted contact, pool money for events in calendar, etc)
add other cryptocurrencies (e.g. Bitcoin and ETH) and payment networks (e.g. Lightning)

But no, they instead did:

accept Bitcoin as payment for Proton
release Bitcoin wallet
??

At least it's non-custodial, but that raises more questions because if it's non-custodial, I presumably already have another wallet anyway. The wallet doesn't add anything directly useful.

The wallet doesn’t add anything directly useful.

It adds a couple of things which can be useful:

You have a single receive email, but it's associated with a full HD wallet, so every receive will generate a brand new unused address for the sender. As the email is static, you could for example post it for donations and not have to worry about people being able to track anything you've received. Of course this only works with other Proton users which is kind of pointless, but perhaps it's the start of some sort of interoperability standard?
They have support which you can contact, which while almost certainly isn't important for you, for your aunty it might be useful.

This seems to only work between Proton accounts, so I doubt many would actually do that. And it seems they're using the regular BTC network, not Lightning, so fees are going to be huge ($1.60 from their screenshots). Monero solves this way better since there's no way to see someone else's balance with their address, and transactions are pretty cheap (a few cents). Their solution doesn't actually add privacy, it just obfuscates transactions a bit. Lightning does a much better job w/ privacy (it's private until you close the channel) and costs (transactions are way cheaper and way faster than regular BTC), and it would be the ideal solution to this problem since it still uses BTC.
Sure, but aunty is highly unlikely to be using Proton, much less Bitcoin. It's a service for enthusiasts. Support is absolutely important though, I just don't think aunty is likely to be sending crypto over Proton.

I still don't really see who this is for. The requirements to actually using it productively is that your contacts need to also have Proton. If most of your contacts use Proton, that means you're probably running a business or something and thus don't need to send BTC to eachother.

Focusing on regular users makes way more sense than focusing on these niche use-cases. Make it so I can easily use cryptocurrencies for online payments. Integration with Proton Pass makes way more sense than integrating with email.

Oh I agree with you. I am a daily crypto user and I have no use for this wallet. I was just offering some things it adds which might be useful.

Lightning is a big missed opportunity. Phoenix is the only wallet I know that has solved this in a user-friendly way.

(I did also mention that it only works between Proton accounts.)

Yeah, not trying to argue with you or anything, it's just a pretty big disappointment for me. I really want to be able to do privacy-friendly transactions, and I guess I wish someone like Proton or Mozilla would that up.

Something like a Proton Wallet could be really cool if I could add a few different payment options (e.g. XMR, BTC, credit, debit, bank transfer), and then pick the one I want at checkout based on what the vendor supports. They could add this to a phone app and get tap-to-pay working, which would really lower the barrier to people using crypto. It would then be backed by Proton's privacy and security (e.g. stored on encrypted Proton Drive, no logging, etc).

I probably still wouldn't use it because I don't trust any single entity with all of my data, but if it appeals to the mass market, then I benefit as well.

So yeah, I guess I'm just frustrated and disappointed.

Since either I missed it, or it wasn't made clear, and I'm not going to go sign up for anything to check - who is maintaining custody of the Bitcoin with this?

It sounds like it's web-based which makes me think Proton is, and not you, but again, maybe I missed something?

who is maintaining custody of the Bitcoin

It's self-custody.

The only thing I use Proton for is free email accounts. They take that away, I move to cock li (I'm already in the middle of a mini-move but you can never be sure of when the smaller providers will fold).