Yup, just like cash, because that’s what it’s trying to be. It’s as close to digital cash as you can get: untraceable, stable, low transaction fees.

How so?

It’s the closest you can get to digital cash. It’s untraceable, has very low transaction costs (a few cents), and it’s mining-resistant (so no big mining farms). It’s not popular for speculation, so the price tends to be pretty stable (has been pretty flat for 2 years now), at least related to other coins. I honestly haven’t seen many scams around it, probably because it’s a tough sell to get someone to “invest” (it’s never going “to the moon”).

If you are looking for a digital alternative to cash, Monero is it. The main problem with it is due to its main benefit: governments don’t like it because it’s untraceable, and because it’s untraceable, it’s often used for illegal activity. So you can’t buy it directly in many areas due to gov’t regulations, but you can usually trade another cryptocurrency for it (e.g. Bitcoin), but you should do it in relatively large transactions because BTC fees can be steep (as in, $1-2 fees, so convert >$100 at a time).

People don’t advocate for it because they’re looking to get rich, they’re advocating for it because they want more options to spend their Monero, and the more people that use it, the more stores will accept it.

I suppose. But once you’ve done it once, you can usually just reference an existing config and change the 1-2 things that need changing. The Arch Wiki is super helpful, and it’s really nice to be able to have it start on boot.

To each their own, I’m glad both options exist.

Yes, it needs like a month or two to be built, but after that the most time you’ll spend on it is when you add tokens. If you look at something like the electrum wallet, there are like 3 ppl working on it in their free time.

Also: Imagine you’re the average proton user. You probably don’t know what PGP is, you mostly use proton for the VPN and you use Google as your default search engine.
You just got solar and you’re thinking about what to do with the excess energy created at mid day, so you download NiceHash or whatever and set up a wallet.

Wouldn’t it be a nice thing if the company that you’re already trusting with your mails, data and internet traffic had a crypto wallet? Like, yes, trusting one company with everything is not best practice, but trusting proton with everything is still better than using some random closed-source software.

And again: people voted for another chat app and a browser. WTF.

I’m similar, I’ve been on Linux for 15-ish years and I’ve been pushing to get off Google. So I get the anti-big company sentiment. I also understand being tired of crypto nonsense, there are so many scams that the handful of legitimate use-cases get buried in a sea of speculation.

But offering a crypto wallet has nothing to do with that. Proton doesn’t get any of the crypto, and you could get essentially the same thing with just using their drive to store your keys and using a separate wallet app. I could probably build a Bitcoin wallet in a weekend, they’re really not that complicated and there are plenty of FOSS libraries and whatnot to borrow from.

I get it though, there are a ton of crypto scams out there. If Proton created their own coin, then I’d be with you running for the hills. But just offering a wallet might catch the attention of new customers, and more customers means more investment in their platform. Proton is transitioning to a non-profit structure, so they’re really not in it to make a quick buck, they’re on it to build a solid, sustainable business.

My main complaint is that they’re prioritizing Bitcoin, which is very much not a privacy-focused cryptocurrency, instead of Monero, which is a lot more privacy focused (but also more complex to build a wallet for), so their appeal to privacy-minded crypto people would be minimal. But it’s low hanging fruit so why not?

Companies do the second all the time. As the number of services grows, so do the options for service tiers. But that only works if there’s competition. For example, my ISP had two options for years, but as soon as my city announced a new fiber rollout, they overhauled their product offering with options above and below the previous options. I just checked and they overhauled things again (new higher tiers), and now my tier is $5/month cheaper than it used to be. In my area, we currently have about 4 options (cable, DSL, my local ISP, radio), and we’re adding a city-owned fiber network as a fifth.

Oh, and they added more features and now offer TV, managed WiFi, etc, and those are also at competitive prices. So at least in my case, adding options has decreased prices due to product segmentation.

Back when I only had 2 options (cable or DSL), their prices kept going up and their features stayed stagnant.

They've made a poll that had questions about AI, but no clear options to indicate that you don't want anything to deal with AI. From the results, less than 20% of the voters signalled that they wanted an AI offering from Proton, those being business users, and less than a month later Proton introduces (to business accounts at the moment) a LLM that writes email for you (that has to decrypt and read plain text the emails that were supposed to be stored with zero access encryption), and it uses a model that was trained on copyrighted data without permission.

Not even two weeks later they come up with this crypto wallet, and both endeavours are on two very sensitive and controversial topics, to a point it seems Proton is "selling out" to techbros.

All the while, you can't even create or edit folders and labels on their mail mobile apps.

The product was an LLM.

I could go on and on about those features on that page that are there for ages, but one struck me hard in the last hour:
I tried cancelling my subscription, and after clicking on 6 "I'm sure" buttons and writing a reason why, I couldn't cancel because I was using too much storage (3GB, free accounts have a 500MB limit). I deleted everything on my Drive and emptied the trash, tried again, no success. Deleted all my emails and emptied the trash, still failed. Deleted everything on Calendar and Pass, nothing. Couldn't find anywhere how to contact support. There's a small bar that shows how much storage I'm using, one would expect that clicking on it would show a summary of what's using your storage, but all it does is show a popup with Proton's subscription plans.

I can't cancel my subscription because they don't have the basic functionality of a storage usage summary.

What does a privacy conscious version even look like?

Some things simply aren’t legal anymore like buying crypto without identification.

Problem is, as they said in their bloc post, that to handle real money they have to get the required authorisation from the Swiss bank authority.

Yeah, I don’t get it. We all came here because Reddit, a centralized service, did us dirty and we got pissed and left. We just came out of high inflation and many areas still have high inflation, and it’s largely because of central banks doing us dirty, but we’re fighting to maintain that status quo.

Yeah, I get it, there are a ton of scams with cryptocurrencies. There are also a lot of fiat scams as well (stock picking, hard money lending, etc). Don’t hate the tool scammers use, hate the scams.

It seems many here miss the forest for the trees. Most cryptocurrencies are scams, but there are a handful of interesting ones:

• Bitcoin - the OG; useless as a currency, but the lightning network fixes most of its issues
• Monero - as close as to get to digital cash, which is why criminals like it (both are untraceable); oh, and it’s mining resistant, so to won’t see big Monero mining farms, just a hobbyist running it while playing games or whatever
• Ethereum - proof of stake instead of proof of work, so it uses way less energy

As long as you don’t see it as an investment, it’s totally fine. I have never and probably will never “invest” in Bitcoin because it’s all hype and I don’t think there’s any reason to think it’ll continue going up.

I hate how much banks and governments snoop on my transactions and sell my data to the highest bidder, and Monero offers a way to recover my privacy. Bitcoin lightning is also pretty good, but its privacy features aren’t quite as good.

So don’t “invest” in crypto bu do look into it as a currency. If enough people use it, stores will start accepting it (and I’ve seen a handful that do).