Oh wow, they’re hitting all the shitty gimmicks in one fell swoop!
I expected more from them, even more so when they turned into a non profit.
Two points to make:
- What did they do wrong here?
- Isn’t it better for these products to be provided by a nonprofit?
LLMs are expensive power hungry beasts of limited use.
Crypto is similarly a power hungry beast. It’s also primarily a niche pseudo currency that’s arguably more regularly used for crime than legitimate purchases.
“Feed what you wish to grow” applies here … and TBH I’m okay with what they’ve done with the LLM. The crypto wallet … I just wish we’d let crypto die. Bitcoin in particular is too unstable for the average person to use as some kind of normal currency. People also see it as an investment, but it’s a super questionable investment that is backed only by the arbitrary value we give it.
Nothing wrong with a crime currency, easier to get safe drugs.
It’s also primarily a niche pseudo currency that’s arguably more regularly used for crime than legitimate purchases.
That’s true for cash as well, but that’s because of a few factors:
- credit cards are more attractive due to rewards
- sales tax makes buying things w/ cash a pain in person
- you can’t use cash online, the closest you have are debit cards, but breaches make that unsafe
Cryptocurrencies can solve these problems. Since it’s digital, there’s nothing physical to carry around, online purchases are secure, and some vendors charge a lower fee for accepting crypto (e.g. https://based.win has a 10% discount for Monero). Since it’s distributed, you’re not stuck w/ 3-4 “networks” to process transactions, so transaction fees are generally lower (e.g. Visa/Mastercard/etc generally charge ~3%, whereas Monero charges a few pennies, regardless of transaction amount).
The reason it’s more often used for crime is because few vendors accept cryptocurrency as payment, mostly because demand is low. The more people that use cryptocurrencies for legitimate purchases, the more companies will accept it and the ratio between legitimate vs criminal transactions will go down.
I wouldn’t be surprised if cash is more often used for crime than legitimate purchases, mostly because cash is annoying to use. That doesn’t mean we should eliminate cash, it means we should make using it less annoying (e.g. include sales tax on listed price and not just calculated at checkout). I see cash used a lot more in states w/ no sales tax, and I hear Europeans use cash a lot more as well because VAT is included in the list price.
I know A LOT of people that still use cash and use it frequently for legitimate purchases.
There are also several places around here that are cash only shops, and several more that will charge you extra for using a credit card.
Cash is an official, government sanctioned, form of currency. Part of the appeal of cryptocurrencies is they’re a currency that’s outside of government management.
The problem with bitcoin in particular is volatility vs any other reference currency is insane. You might have enough to buy an expensive house one day, then a few months later you only have enough for a cheap car, then a few months later you can buy an even nicer house (or maybe not!). That’s just not practical for most people … I don’t think it ever will be practical for most people.
If we get a “stable coin” that requires low power draw … maybe? But is that really better than just using a credit card? Are online purchases really more secure? People get their wallet stolen in real life, getting your digital wallet stolen is something that can totally happen too. There’s no FDIC on your bitcoin, a bitcoin wallet isn’t a bank.
Crypto fans love to talk up crypto coins but … I just do not see them as a practical solution to much of anything. We would be far better off improving security of credit cards so you can manage your purchases in a system that’s more like PayPal’s where there’s a way to see “these are the things that are authorized to take money from you automatically” and “these are the things where we generated a one time token and this is how much you paid.”
The things I’ve seen about bitcoin at scale have also suggested it could never even come close to the transaction speed of VISA.
I just … I am so far from sold. I found Bitcoin when it was ~1 USD per bitcoin. I wish I’d bought just $50 of bitcoin back then and sat on it, but I don’t think bitcoin ever has soared because of its merits. It’s kind of like this AI hype right now, block chains have very limited practical usability.
If we get a “stable coin” that requires low power draw
I don’t know about power draw, but Monero is relatively stable ($120-$170 over the last 2 years; avg $157, and generally stays between $140-160) and is unprofitable to mine, so you only get enthusiasts who really like the coin doing it. I think, on net, it uses significantly less than Bitcoin, just because blocksizes are variable size and there are no mining farms (less competition should mean less waste), but that’s incredibly hard to measure or even estimate, and we’d need to take transaction costs into account as well (e.g. I’d be willing to spend more electricity if it meant less money going to bank profits). We could compare Reddit to Lemmy as a similar example, Reddit will be cheaper to operate per user (less duplication), but Lemmy is community driven and has no incentive to screw over users.
Ethereum uses proof-of-stake, so it has much lower power draw than pretty much anything else, but there’s still a ton of speculation that causes prices to change dramatically ($1100-3800 over the past 2 years). Eth has a higher transaction fee than Monero by a pretty large factor, so it’s not great as a currency either. But maybe it’ll encourage more coins to switch to proof-of-stake and drop energy use by the cryptocurrency market substantially.
People get their wallet stolen in real life, getting your digital wallet stolen is something that can totally happen too. There’s no FDIC on your bitcoin, a bitcoin wallet isn’t a bank.
There’s also no FDIC protection on cash. You should, IMO, be treating cryptocurrencies more like a pile of cash than a bank (though it’s more secure than cash). You don’t need FDIC protection on your spending money, but you should have it on your savings. My investments are at investment brokerages w/ SIPC protection, my emergency fund is at a bank, and my spending money could totally be in crypto, if I had more places to spend it.
Crypto fans love to talk up crypto coins
There are two main types of crypto fans:
- crypto scammers - pump and dump, jump from coin to coin, etc; their goal is to make money
- crypto enthusiasts - just want to use them to buy stuff
The first are very vocal and should be avoided at all costs, while the second just don’t want anyone (banks, governments, etc) to be able to snoop on their transactions. I’m the second, and I honestly don’t currently own any cryptocurrencies, but I’m interested in Monero to replace credit cards in online purchases (I have a wallet set up, still haven’t gotten to funding it).
The things I’ve seen about bitcoin at scale have also suggested it could never even come close to the transaction speed of VISA.
Well, the Bitcoin lightning network dramatically improves that and is competitive with VISA and other credit card networks. I don’t know the specific numbers, but initial verification of funds (basically what happens when you buy something w/ your credit card) happens almost instantly (seconds), but “settling” takes a bit longer (minutes to days), much like with credit card companies (i.e. “pending” transactions).
Monero is similar. Broadcasting the payment request takes about a second, and settling the transaction takes a few minutes. So for small purchases like a coffee, you probably wouldn’t wait for settlement, but you would for larger transactions (e.g. buying a car) because there’s technically a risk of double-spending within that block verification time.
Since vendors wouldn’t need to pay transaction fees for VISA, Mastercard, etc, I think they’d be willing to occasionally eat the cost of someone scamming them with a double-spend (pretty high effort for the scammer, esp. in person).
So cryptocurrency is ready today to replace credit card networks. You can use Bitcoin Lightning or Monero today and get near-instant verification of funds and reasonable settlement times (usually minutes, maybe hours). The main issue is vendors accepting it as payment.
I don’t think bitcoin ever has soared because of its merits
Agreed. I strongly discourage anyone from buying BTC as an investment. I don’t regret not buying BTC when I first noticed it, because if I made a good return, I’d think I know something about it and end up gambling it all away on crypto trades (also why I don’t buy individual stocks anymore). I have never and probably will never see cryptocurrency as an investment product, because I don’t see any reason for it to increase or decrease in value aside from speculation, whereas I do think things like stocks have understandable and predictable behaviors (on longer time scales, not short-term).
So I don’t buy any cryptocurrencies as investments, I’m purely interested in using them for transactions. I’d love to just use cash, but that doesn’t work online and is a pain in real life, so I’m hoping cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Monero become mainstream enough that I can do that. Given how many breaches there have been, I just don’t trust debit cards, since banks can put checking/savings on hold much longer than credit card companies do (banks make money by holding money, credit cards make money by you spending money).
So I’m sold on the general idea, I’m just limited by places to spend it. That’s why I encourage people to use it, so demand goes up and more stores start accepting it.
The issue is that they’re neglecting their core apps in favor of expanding their portfolio. There’s nothing wrong with creating these apps, but it should not be done until the core apps are industry leading and extremely refined.
The developers they used to create this wallet could have been used to fix protonmail bugs, or to bring protonvpn on Linux up to snuff. There’s still no first party CLI for Linux boxes, for example.
I will say, I disagree with this perspective as a developer.
Adding more people doesn’t inherently make the product better. You can have too many cooks in the kitchen and too many people stepping on each other’s toes.
It’s like the saying 9 women can’t make a baby in a month.
I think the other apps are moving at a reasonable pace. Though I do wish they’d put some more people on Linux desktop apps… Maybe even a Linux distribution “Proton OS” could be very interesting.
I don’t see much value in a “Proton OS,” there are already more than enough Linux distros to choose from. But better Linux compat is always welcome, I’d much rather see them put resources there than on a distro.
there are already more than enough Linux distros to choose from
Found the n00b.
So why does Proton work on multiple products at the same time? Simply because:
- throwing more bodies at existing efforts has a point of diminishing returns and then a point when it even becomes counterproductive
- given the lengthy minimum time it takes to perfect services, starting earlier lets us deliver more to the community over the long term
That’s why we bring new services to market earlier than some of you would like, but I can also say that it’s never done if we believe it would compromise an existing effort.
It doesn’t seem proton is neglecting their core apps, instead it seems they are getting more people, so each service has enough people. https://proton.me/careers
I’ve been pretty happy with my swap to Proton lately, but this makes me nervous.
Not that I hate AI or crypto, but their mail app, the thing they’re known for, is not feature complete on all platforms. I still cannot set or edit filters on mobile, for example.
If your flagship app is missing basic features that users have reported for months but you just keep rolling out new shit, it starts to feel like too much like Google, yakno?
Agree on Crypto, but the LLM is literally a Proton Mail feature.
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.
i am surprised they went with bitcoin and not a privacy focused coin like monero
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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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.
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
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.
cringe. monero is basically the only viable cryptocurrency. the rest is just for gambling.
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Tech companies are committed to turning satire into reality.
Crypto and AI, they went all out…
Waiting for sweet nfts to drop.
The wallet is not, I think, surprising. Proton Mail is billed as a trusted holder of email that you want private. In the US, there are specifically some people who want an out-of-country provider of email service. A lot of use of cryptocurrency is from people who want private financial transactions. I will bet that there is overlap in userbase.
I also don’t know how they’re billing their LLM service, but a thing that some people don’t like about LLM services – and I am among those – is that what you write can be data-mined. If they’re selling this as a service where they charge a fee not to do that, that might make a lot of sense in terms of their privacy company reputation.
I use Kagi as my search engine. They do the “we don’t log or mine your data, but rather charge a subscription fee” thing too – though unlike Proton, they’re not overseas for US users – so they’re gonna be selling to a market of people who are willing to pay something for privacy. And they also just started providing LLM service. I bet that they have the same rationale.
You can get your own hardware and run latent diffusion software locally. I have. But that’s expensive.
It saves a lot of money, if you only need the hardware computing N% of the time, to buy the hardware and share it with other people, both in compute capacity and cost. Then you only need to pay N% plus a bit for the service provider to make a return.
I suspect that a lot of companies have done the math, figured out that the economics work, and are aiming for that market – people who want to use latent diffusion software, want privacy for use, but don’t need them hot 100% of the time, and don’t want to pay to get their own hardware at home.
It used to be common, when all computers were more expensive, for all computing access to be sold like this, on time-sharing systems. Nobody (or very few people!) could afford a computer of their own, but you could afford to buy some compute time on one. Some of this is probably temporary, because right now, Nvidia has a significant lead and can (and does) charge a fat premium; I assume that if AMD or someone else can get parity for compute acceleration, then that’ll force Nvidia’s pricing down. But it may be that there’s a whole new world of interesting applications that can only be done with very large models that require very large hardware, in which case we might see, on an ongoing basis and for parallel compute applications, a world that looks more like the 1960s for computers, where there are a limited number of computers in datacenters, and instead of owning your own, you buy slices of time on them.
EDIT: Yeah, I haven’t looked at Proton recently, but look at their main page. They’re selling a whole suite of online services, and the whole thing that they’re billing themselves as on the thing is providing privacy, and they specifically emphasize that they’re in Switzerland. The slogan that they’re using is “Proton: Privacy by default”. My guess is that basically, their aim is to build a reputation of someone who is neither data-mining people’s data nor is readily-accessible to law enforcement (well, if you’re in the US…things might be different if you’re Swiss!), and then to sell services with that aspect as a selling point.
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They should stop adding more and more services and instead focus on making existing services better or - in some cases - feature complete first.
Like proton mail? The existing service that this update is adding a feature to?
Maybe they should get search working first? Or just contacts sync?
What’s wrong with the search?
Also, sync contacts to what?
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.
No, the LLM. The LLM is for use in ProtonMail only.
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.
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.
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.
… 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.”
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I did that here, using the iCloud custom domain setup in lieu of google.
Works fine assuming you have some iOS / Mac devices.
Maybe my flashlight app can do it next.
It ain’t a real flashlight app if it can’t automatically flash to vibe with any songs heard from the background
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scTjHvot3Uo To those who downvote, haven’t you learned that centralisation of services always ends horribly, remember Reddit, twitter, Google, remember why do we go to lemmy, why do we use Linux and self host services, because we wanted decentralised system that won’t enshitify as a whole, even if something goes bad, like meta’s threads, you can isolate it, yes? But if everything was centralised like in Facebook and others, could you do the same thing? Of course not, never forget folks, centralisation never goes well in the long run, but in short term it’s gonna be great if course
So much for my plan of looking into a Proton mail account.
