I just got access to Proton Wallet earlier today. Is there anything you’d like to know?
Q&A
- I’m on a family plan and have been a paying customer for about 2/3 years.
- I haven’t bought any Bitcoin yet but will report back on that once I have.
I don’t see the point to this. All their other products seem to be targeted at replacing less private, non-E2EE services. Mail, calendar, VPN, and a password manager are excellent choices with no major well integrated E2EE solution. This, not so much.
Also, I don’t really get why they chose Bitcoin, it’s PoW and is much less energy efficient than other alternatives while also not being as private as Monero, nor having things like smart contracts.
If you want the answers to the questions you listed, then it’s pretty much covered in the privacy podcast called OptOut. Linked here if u wanted to have a listen.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1790481/15505787-proton-wallet-w-andy-yen.mp3
They probably started with BTC because the majority of the world believes that it’s private (we know it’s easily traceable). Bring in the new users!
I encountered a scary bug in Proton Wallet, posting here in case someone has the same problem
I sent around 20 euros worth of bitcoins to a friend, to test the service. Everything went fine and was very easy and intuitive
Today I logged in and noticed my balance was short by about 220 euros; It indicated that the transaction also sent around 220 euros to a second bitcoin address, classified as “external recipient”. This is usually normal, the wallet sends “change” back to itself, but in this case it didn’t seem to go back to me and the “external recipient” totally threw me off.
I imported proton wallet with Sparrow Wallet, it showed the same, incorrect, balance. I increased the “gap” value from 20 to 300 and the balance now shows up OK in Sparrow Wallet. The issue happens because Proton Wallet doesn’t use the first available change address, it used a random one way further down the list. In my case the “change” income was the change address 20-300th (I had to scroll a lot to find it).
My balance still shows incorrectly in Proton Wallet and the transaction shows as -240 euros. I have reported this issue to Proton, hopefully no one else will be scared :P
Signed up for decent encrypted email and now I feel like Proton’s only goal is to shove so much extra shit down my throat that they’ll choke me to death- and apparently I’m the only subscriber completely uninterested in any of it.
Besides this wallet, what are you referring to with ‘extra shit’?
Proton VPN, Proton Drive, Proton Pass, etc- none of these existed when I signed up but here they are. If anything I’d rather opt out of all the extra stuff for a discounted rate, but that’ll never happen.
If you just want Mail, there’s the Mail Plus plan, which is just the Mail (with a little bit of Drive for mail storage) and cheaper than the Unlimited plan. I see what you’re saying though. I’d like more customisable plans too. I use Drive and Mail, but don’t want the others and the Mail Plus plan doesn’t have enough for Drive (for my usecase), so I have to shell out for Unlimited.
I genuinely don’t get why they made a Bitcoin wallet, but all of their other services are direct competitors to (and imo much better than) the Google suite apps and made it much easier to de-google my life
Proton Wallet is intended to be a Google Wallet alternative. They just started with Bitcoin.
Not going to work without full KYC/AML compliance. Which negates the whole point of using Proton to begin with.
Do you ever use the VPN?
Already have a different provider, so no.
To be fair, why not just drop the other provider and use Proton? Should be cheaper that way. I also didn’t ask for any of this, and use email almost exclusively, but the VPN has come in handy a few times.
