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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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How will it hurt them? If you don't want a Bitcoin wallet, don't use it. It's not like offering one takes a significant amount of resources or drives up the cost.
I’m not a customer, but I personally avoid any company offering that mentions crypto and/or AI. I’m guessing I’m not alone based on some responses here. They are just the latest buzz words to try to inflate company value and I’m tired of them.
I started migrating off from Google products (homepage, chrome, drive soon) and my laptop does not have windows anymore for example. It’s hard to get customer trust back after it is lost.
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?
As a userbase grows, companies have 2 options to make it more competitive.
More services Lower prices
And no company chooses the later.
And that's how you get bloat
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.