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.

  • @asapEnglish
    36•8 days ago

    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.