Introducing Proton Wallet – a safer way to hold Bitcoin | Proton
proton.me
Proton Wallet is an easy-to-use self-custodial wallet that makes financial freedom attainable for everyone.
  • Zerfallen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2110·
    3 months ago

    I feel like some people just hear “crypto” or “ai” and start screeching and clawing at the air.

    Not every feature needs to be for you specifically, these features are optional and don’t compromise or even impact their other products. They seem to be on-brand in being more privacy-focused alternatives to some of the existing market options while remaining accessible, and keeps Proton in the game depending on how the landscape develops.

    I don’t use Proton (yet) but I generally like what they’re doing and hope they succeed, and I don’t see any of these developments as negatives, just more competition.

  • bitwolf@lemmy.oneEnglish
    493·
    3 months ago

    Oh wow, they’re hitting all the shitty gimmicks in one fell swoop!

  • Telorand@reddthat.comEnglish
    593·
    3 months ago

    I expected more from them, even more so when they turned into a non profit.

    I have no interest in it, but Bitcoin wallets aren’t necessarily private, and they say the LLM is also private. Given that pretty much everything is trying to mine as much data as possible from your digital interactions, this seems on brand for them.

    I still have no interest in Proton Unlimited, but maybe enough of their customers want these features (or they think they will).

      • L_Acacia@lemmy.oneEnglish
        63·
        3 months ago

        They is no chance they are the one training it. It costs hundreds of millions to get a descent model. Seems like they will be using mistral, who have scrapped pretty much 100% of the web to use as training data.

          • 0laura@lemmy.worldEnglish
            10·
            3 months ago

            yes, you can download SD1.5 models that will generate all kinds of degenerate images for you and deneutered LLMs that will write the most disgusting smut you’ve ever seen. all of it locally, free and 100% private.

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
        111·
        3 months ago

        Techradar says it’s based on the Mistral 7B large language model. But they should definitely disclose that kind of information. It’s important to know how a tool works and what kind of mistakes, biases etc are to be expected when using it for important communication.

  • narc0tic_bird@lemm.eeEnglish
    61·
    3 months ago

    They should stop adding more and more services and instead focus on making existing services better or - in some cases - feature complete first.

      • narc0tic_bird@lemm.eeEnglish
        92·
        3 months ago

        What, sending bitcoin? That’s not really a feature of Proton Mail, rather it’s a feature of the wallet that happens to be able to send bitcoin via email (I suppose so that the recipient can then transfer the funds to a bitcoin address of their choice unless their email address is already linked to Proton Wallet).

        Even if you’d consider this a feature of Proton Mail, how does this have higher priority than a proper iPad/tablet app, or the ability to add a .ics attachment directly to my (default, non-Proton) calendar without having to manually download the .ics file, open it with a file manager and then add it to the calendar? Filtered views (for example: view unread and starred messages but nothing else in one list)? A somewhat usable offline mode? The list goes on, and that’s just Proton Mail. Proton Drive still lacks a native Linux app (I know there’s “support” for Proton Drive in rclone, but that’s hacked together because Proton doesn’t even provide official API documentation and stability commitments).

        I’d rather pay for the individual services that I can actually (somewhat) use, like Mail (even though it’s not great), but their Mail only tier severely lacks in features (only 1 custom email domain is my main problem). If they’d then commit the financial resources towards improving the service being paid for, that’d be great.

  • Veedem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1613·
    3 months ago

    All of this convinced me to give up on moving all my accounts to their service and just use the iCloud service I already pay for. Trying to get away from GMail and Google’s privacy policies, but it felt like these moves indicated greater change coming to a service I was sincerely optimistic about prior.

    • clothes@lemmy.worldEnglish
      311·
      3 months ago

      I won’t be using these features, but I’m not sure there’s cause for concern. The implementation seems very sensible and legitimately privacy-centric. The LLM runs locally and is meant as an very basic email proofreader. The crypto wallet is a likely an extension of the password management tech they’ve already developed, with transaction features that some people care about.

      I can see why some people want these features, and I’m glad there are new alternatives.

      • mriormro@lemmy.worldEnglish
        68·
        3 months ago

        Coming from someone who hasn’t gotten into the weeds with this company, my understanding was that they did email. I was considering migrating over to them in order to de-google completely.

        This move, specifically, has caused me to reconsider and scrap those plans. Not every tech company needs to peddle ai and crypto bullshit.

        • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggEnglish
          73·
          3 months ago

          … they do email, but they also do other things. They still do email better than the alternatives.

          It’s kind of like if Chipotle came out with hamburgers and you were like “well I want a burrito but I’ll never get one of their burritos now, they’re just like all the other fast food now.”

    • gray@pawb.socialEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      I did that here, using the iCloud custom domain setup in lieu of google.

      Works fine assuming you have some iOS / Mac devices.

  • Drewski@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    191·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • makeasnek@lemmy.mlEnglish
      10·
      3 months ago

      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.

    • bitwolf@lemmy.oneEnglish
      51·
      3 months ago

      It’s not supposed to be private. However it’s very effective at being pseudo-anonymous

  • GreenStar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    91·
    3 months ago

    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

    • GreenStar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • 0laura@lemmy.worldEnglish
        83·
        3 months ago

        cringe. monero is basically the only viable cryptocurrency. the rest is just for gambling.

  • makeasnek@lemmy.mlEnglish
    121·
    3 months ago

    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.

  • kate@lemmy.uhhoh.comEnglish
    193·
    3 months ago

    i am surprised they went with bitcoin and not a privacy focused coin like monero

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      21·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • kate@lemmy.uhhoh.comEnglish
        3·
        3 months ago

        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.

      • makeasnek@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        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.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          11·
          3 months ago

          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.

        • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zipEnglish
          21·
          3 months ago

          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.

          • makeasnek@lemmy.mlEnglish
            2·
            3 months ago

            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).

            • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zipEnglish
              21·
              3 months ago

              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.