PROTON WALLET: Privacy, Censorship & Building on Bitcoin - Andy Yen (THE Bitcoin Podcast)

This is incredibly powerful. And it is one of the most, I think powerful business concepts ever because the issue that we faced today, even 10 years on, if Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and the big banks decided to gain up on Proton, they can still do the same thing to us today, right? So from that moment to today, I think I've always been an advocate of how can we get this powerful concept that any other proton to survive 10 years ago and make it more widespread, make it more common.

Because I think the future of business, democracy, freedom, it really depends on this. ["The Bitcoin Podcast"] Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is The Bitcoin Podcast. The Bitcoin time chain is 860780 and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin. Today's episode is Bitcoin Talk where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin and whatever else comes up. Today, that guest is Andy Yen. Andy is the CEO and founder of Proton.

Not only does Proton offer encrypted email, VPN file storage and a password manager, but they recently announced their launching Proton Wallet, a self custodial Bitcoin only wallet, which is currently in beta, but which will soon be available to their 100 million users worldwide. Andy and I dig into the creation of Proton by himself and other physicists at CERN.

The early days and how they first got introduced to Bitcoin back in 2014 and why, how Proton Wallet actually works to both protect your privacy and provide a great user experience, Proton versus Google. The overall Proton ethos, Proton's move to become a nonprofit plus a whole lot more. I really enjoyed this discussion with Andy. It was super fascinating and I think you are going to love this conversation and hearing more about Proton Wallet.

Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin podcast, wherever you're listening or watching and check out my sponsor, Bitbox in the show notes. Or you can just go directly to bitbox.swiss slash walker and use the promo code Walker for 5% off the fully open source Bitcoin only Bitbox 02 hardware wallet. You can also grab links to protect yourself from sim swap attacks using a Fani or cloaked wireless.

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Finally, if you are a Bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast, hit me up on social media or via the website, bitcoinpodcast.net or shoot me an email. It's hello at bitcoinpodcast.net. Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Andy Yen. Andy, welcome. Thanks for coming on the Bitcoin podcast. It's great to have you here. Yeah, thanks for having me.

I've heard a bit about your show and I think your users are probably, or your listeners are probably our users. So, glad to give some answers inside and show a bit what's going on behind the scenes at Proton. Absolutely, and I'm a Proton user myself. I've been for a number of years now. I was very happy also when I discovered you guys had a VPN product. It allowed me to get rid of my Express VPN, which was kind of garbage to be honest. And yeah, so I like Proton a lot.

Full disclosure, I am in no way for anyone listening sponsored by Proton or anything like that. I just really enjoy the product. And I'll be honest, when you guys dropped the Proton wallet announcement, at least for me, it felt kind of out of the blue in a very good way. I was thinking, wow, this is really cool. I love Proton as a service, use it for a while. You guys have a lot of users. And this seemed like something that was just a very pleasant surprise.

I'm just thinking, wow, okay, Proton's been working on this behind the scenes and now they're coming out with a wallet. But so I've got a bunch of questions for you, but maybe we could just start out so that people get to know you a little bit better. Who are you? How did you get here today to be building a privacy-focused email and whole tech stack that is competing with Google? Yeah, well, thanks for your support. It's always great to talk to someone that knows and uses a product.

And it's people like you and also members of your audience that really make our work possible. First of all, thanks for that. A bit about me. I think in some sense, I'm kind of an anomaly in the tech crypto Bitcoin space. What do you have in this space? You've got maybe the really technical computer science hacking types, although there's fewer and fewer of those.

You've got a lot of what I might call the business bros who came out of business pool somewhere, want to make a buck, have some idea, and decide this is the best way to make money. And then people like me who are the real scientists, I do my PhD in particle physics. I'm actually a scientist originally. I find there aren't so many of us in this space. And I think that's maybe the history that makes a proton a little bit different. We were not an idea cooked up in a business school seminar.

It was something that really came out at the beginning as a project, a passion project, between me and some friends when we were working back at CERN. That's the European Center for Nuclear Research. So we were actually physicists working at the Large Shedron Collider, the biggest particle accelerator in the world, here in Geneva, Switzerland. And from there, that was around the time, actually, of the Edward Snowden League, so it was 2013, so it was actually 10 years ago.

And we lived that and we said, wow, you know, government surveillance is really bad, but actually corporate surveillance is way worse. If you consider what the NSA has on you, compared to what Google and Facebook has, it's a drop in the bucket. So we thought, well, that's a really difficult problem. And as a scientist, what attracts you? You're attracted to very difficult problems because you're like the intellectual challenge of the problems.

You're not really so concerned about the same making money because if you wanted it to get rich, you don't go into science, right? It's not really the most lucrative career for most people. And I can tell you, PhD students are not paid very well, right? But you want hard problems that could potentially improve the state of the world and are interesting to work on. So the whole privacy problem of how we actually get privacy back in the 21st century, that seemed quite fascinating.

And that was kind of how we started going down the rabbit hole and I started thinking of this problem. And the benefit of being a scientist is you know, you know technology, you know how to program, you know code, you know how service and infrastructure work. So unlike other people who thought, oh, you know, that's an interesting problem. I want to fix it. I was actually in a position to do something about it and actually work on the problem.

And that was really how we kind of, you know, got going. What made Proton also very different from the very beginning was it was always very community focused. You know, if people, most people don't remember this anymore, but some of the folks that have been for this in the beginning will probably remember at the beginning, it was actually a beta product. It was something that, you know, there was a wedding list. You had to get a sign up on it.

And it was a wedding list because back in those days, we had one or two servers. And it was like 10,000 users per day after we first launched. So the beginning was really through a crowdfunding campaign. It was a summer of, you know, 2014, where we said to the music community, okay, you like what we're doing. We want to keep doing it. But on my PhD, you know, grad school salary is not going to work. So, you know, please donate some money to help us grow and sustain the service.

And what was amazing about that was actually 10,000 people around the world donated around half a million dollars to really make proton possible. And that's always stuck with me because the reason that we exist today, the reason that we're here today is really because of the community. And it wasn't, you know, some VC, it wasn't some, you know, financial back or somewhere. It wasn't some, you know, ICO, right?

It was literally people that just decided that they believed in what, you know, I believed in. They believed in this vision and they wanted to bet on it. And they had no, let's say, proof, no evidence, and no guarantee of any success, right? This money that they paid upfront could have just disappeared. And there's in plenty of cases of people just took the money and walked off, right? So, I always come to, you know, I always view this from a sense of deep gratitude, right?

There's a lot of gratitude for the community, for supporting us at the very beginning and getting things going. And this is why I think Proton has always put community at the heart of everything that we do, because it is because of community that, you know, we're here today. So, actually, that's kind of the inception story of how Proton came to be, you know, back in 2014. I love it.

I mean, and you're right that that path of, you know, nuclear physicists to, let's say, email service developer is not one that's super common, perhaps. And you guys now obviously do a lot more than just email. You have a whole stack that you're building out. You have the drive product, you have the VPN, you have the password manager, you have now this Proton wallet, a Bitcoin wallet.

But, and I kind of want to dig into multiple aspects of that, but maybe first, can you tell me, again, from my perspective, it felt like the Proton Bitcoin wallet sort of came out of the blue. Yes, of course, there's a synergy between, okay, privacy-focused, you know, sovereign-focused services that you guys provide, and Bitcoin, yes. But is there more to that story in terms of, you know, kind of Proton's history? What sort of led to saying, you know what, we should build a Bitcoin wallet?

Yeah, and then you touch on two interesting things there. Number one is the background of myself and the early team, you know, as scientists, it is quite unique and quite different, but I would also argue it was what was necessary for this project to even, you know, get out there in the first place. And I'll kind of give it to you, you know, from this perspective. If we had gone to, you know, business school, instead of pursuing a PhD in physics, probably we wouldn't have launched a service.

Because a business model in 2014, from a pure business standpoint, made no sense at all. What was the pitch, right? The pitch was we're going to make people pay for something that the world's biggest and most dominant tech company is giving away for free. There's no investment in the background, right? People will say that's the stupidest business plan I've ever seen, because it's never gonna work.

So in some sense, I think being outsiders to tech, being scientists, it also made us naive enough to try something that back then was frankly insane, even though today it seems pretty common sense. And this takes me back to the crowdfunding as sort of the only way to get started, because you will not find any investor that would take that business plan and say, oh yeah, that makes sense, I'm gonna bet on that. They would say, oh yeah, that's crazy, right?

So the crowdfunding kicked off in June of 2014. And it actually went quite well. We were surprised by how much support we had out in the community, and that was, you know, something that was incredibly, that we're incredibly grateful for even today. But the crowdfunding wasn't actually smooth sailing. And what happened in July, I believe, of 2014, was actually PayPal blocked our account, because they had questions, they said, oh, you know, is encryption legal? Are you allowed to encrypt emails?

Do you have government permission to do what you're doing? Right, so they said, oh, this maybe is illegal, so we're gonna block this money. So all of a sudden, we had this crowdfunding campaign that had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, which we were gonna use to basically benefit the community that supported us, and to make good on the promises that we had made. And this money was suddenly locked up, tied up someplace.

We had no ability to access it, and no idea if we were ever gonna get it back. And you know, there's so many people horror stories, right? Maybe you're locked for a day, maybe it's a week, maybe it's two years, maybe it's forever, right? The outcome is very, very unclear. And it was at that moment that I realized, wow, what I'm trying to do in this project, it's so fragile.

It's so fragile because the financial system is so incredibly centralized, and that if you simply, you know, make someone unhappy with what you're doing, or if someone just makes a mistake, you're basically dead. And what I found interesting in that experience was that was also, well, you know, it was relatively early from a Bitcoin standpoint, right? It was a couple of years after Bitcoin I got started. And someone in our community said, you know what, you should start a second Bitcoin.

You should take Bitcoin donations because PayPal has blocked you, so you know, it's easy to make an address, just open up a Bitcoin link. And we actually did that. So I actually went out there and created, I forgot what website it was, but it was probably one of the OG Bitcoin wallets, right? We created Bitcoin wallets, we put the link out there. And actually, there were significant people from the crypto community that decided to donate through Bitcoin after PayPal blocked our account.

PayPal, of course, eventually unblocked the account, right? But it took them a while, it was quite slow. And in that period, we received quite a few Bitcoins. And they all said, you know, what is this Bitcoin thing? What is this? What is going on here? Like, I don't understand this. And then I went in to dig deeper and I realized, well, okay, this isn't quite powerful. So like, there's no central person that can block these transactions.

There's nobody that can wake up one day, make a mistake and destroy your business. This is incredibly powerful. And it is one of the most, I think powerful business concepts ever, because the issue that we faced today, even 10 years on, if Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and the big banks decided to gain up on Proton, they can still do the same thing to us today, right?

So from that moment to today, I think I've always been an advocate of, how can we get this powerful concept that any other Proton to survive 10 years ago, and making more widespread, making more common, because I think the future of business, democracy, freedom, it really depends on this. And so that was the reason why, in some sense, Proton wallet has been 10 years in the making. It didn't take us 10 years to do it, but the idea of doing it has always been there.

And we're fortunate in 2024 to finally be at a place in terms of organization, in terms of headcount, in terms of resources, to actually make it credible if 10 to do it properly. Because there's been a lot of, let's say, improper things that haven't been done in Bitcoin and crypto over the past 10 years, and we didn't want to do it the wrong way. We want to do it the right way. I love that. And I think that's, it's incredible context.

Again, from the outside looking in, it seemed, oh, what a random but cool thing for Proton to be doing, building a Bitcoin wallet. In reality, Bitcoin was actually there at the Genesis, so to speak, of Proton. And I mean, it's such a, I have to say, I think PayPal has probably been one of the greatest inadvertent marketers for Bitcoin, in that they have shut off so many people from their services. And as a result, people looked for alternatives.

And you had somebody in the community who was, forward-thinking enough to say, hey, check out this Bitcoin thing. And you guys were open enough to say, yeah, we'll try anything. We're dead in the water otherwise. I think that's, it's quite a beautiful little piece of serendipity there that has now brought you here to 10 years later. As you said, you're bigger. You have, what is it, like 100 million users worldwide, something like that?

Yeah, Proton today services 100 million accounts globally across all of our different products. So it's reached quite a big scale, I think. But it's mostly through word of mouth, which I think is quite unique about the setup. And it's, well, it's word of mouth, because to me, Frank, we don't have the money to run tons of advertising. So the best advertising is people who like for service, who then bring in their friends. And that's actually the way that we have grown.

And actually, when we started with encrypted email, people said, well, there's PGP, right? And PGP is true. It's been there since the early 90s, late 80s maybe. But what Proton I think has always excelled at, and what we're also trying to do in proper wallet as well, is the problem PGP was not that it was insecure, right? The problem PGP was that, one click was too much. And what I think we try to do is remove the extra click and have a big focus on user experience.

Because unfortunately, a lot of the things that we wanna do, whether it's encrypted email or even Bitcoin in general, this doesn't really go into the mainstream, unless you can make the user experience equivalent to what people in the mainstream are used to. And it's a tough challenge, but I think that is like the key business problem that we as an organization are trying to solve. And not just for email and encryption, but also for crypto as well and Bitcoin.

I think that's such an important point to dig into because a lot of people, a lot of people, and this is sad to say, and some people may disagree with this, they're free to, but a lot of people don't care enough about their privacy or their data security to sacrifice the user experience.

They truly just will not, quote, go the extra mile, even if it is beneficial to them to do so, even if it's not, quote, that hard, they really just will not go through those extra steps because I mean, that's what often the trade-offs we make for privacy are in favor of convenience, right? That's why people make the trade-offs. Because yeah, everybody could be using PGP or doing whatever other methods there are to keep yourself very, very secure, but most people just aren't going to do that.

They just don't care enough about their privacy. They may care a little bit, but not enough to sacrifice what they view as a seamless user experience that everything's easy. They don't have to worry about it. They don't have to learn something new. And I think that, so that's really powerful is what you guys have been able to do is make privacy easier for people.

Make it so they still have that nice user experience that doesn't make them feel like they need to be a genius with cryptography to figure out how to be just, a bit more private. And I think that that's really powerful. And the same thing applies to Bitcoin as well. It's like a lot of people, even though taking self-custody is not that hard, it's not hard to send a Bitcoin transaction even, copying and pasting, but yeah, it can be daunting.

I know it's, I think it's still daunting for most Bitcoiners, did you copy and paste it right? Did you somehow type an extra word in there or whatever? But still anything that can be done to improve that experience, make it easier, that just lowers the bar for more and more people to come in. And it seems that's really what you guys are trying to do with Proton Wallet.

So maybe we can dig into the wallet a little bit now and just kind of, can you walk me through, it's in beta right now, but kind of, what is the goal with the wallet? Who are you trying to reach as a user? Obviously, you're an existing user base, but what's kind of the methodology behind, how did you decide to build it in the way that you're building it and what does that look like?

Yeah, I think the best way to kind of give you the context there is to start with sort of the motivation and then also the problem, right? So the way that I view it is, if I don't want to be in this situation of, PayPal from 10 years ago, which can always happen to any company anytime in the future, right? Strategically, what makes the most sense is, I would like to have a system where every single Proton user is on Bitcoin. And as a result, is able to pay me through Bitcoin.

And in that world, I am no longer at the mercy of a centralized financial system that really does not have the best interests of Proton, companies or even consumers at heart, right? They only have their own interests at heart, to be honest. So that's the motivation. But then the next question is, why do the vast majority of, so we have of course a lot of Bitcoin users within Proton, but the majority of Proton users are not into Bitcoin or even more broadly crypto. And why is that?

Well, I have sort of two guesses as to why that may be, right? One, if you look at crypto, and again, Bitcoin or crypto, another same thing, but let's just start with crypto in general, right? Crypto has had 10 years of bad headlines continuously. And the FTX thing, I think a while back, that didn't help either, right? Because that was really kind of a huge mess.

So the average user looks at this and say, you know, I can't get involved in this because I'm going to get scammed, I'm going to lose my money, it's horrible, right? Here are all these headlines, these horror stories. The governments, they're telling me this is the worst thing in the world because I'm going to get scammed. And that's if it's going to jail now because of whatever, right? And I think Binance is easy reasoning on the trouble as well, right? So that's I think issue number one.

Then the second issue is if I am already a bit afraid of the space and then I want to dip my toes into it, well, the user experience is so complicated. I don't even know where to start. I don't know how to do it. You know, what is my hash? What is my recovery? That, you know, what is my private key? It's these complicated concepts that can't figure out. It's hard. I feel like I have to study a week just to know how to get started. It's too complicated.

And so those, in my mind, is sort of the main barriers to adoption. And this is the problem that we really want to solve for the bottom world. So let's start with the security problem, right? Fortunately, Proton does have a strong reputation of being secure because it's not because I think we're particularly good or better than, let's say, other people at this. But we've always taken the right choices.

So being open source, for example, allowing people to audit the code and verify that things are properly done, having security at the forefront of how we build things from the beginning, this has led us, let's say, do encryption well. And it's something that we understand and have done for at least 10 years. And so we have that foundation, which I think is critically important to build off of.

And we also have certain things that we have done over the past 10 years by being in the email space that gives us a lot of benefits, I think, that maybe other players within crypto and Bitcoin don't really have. And one of the things that we have is actually 100 million accounts.

And you'll understand one of the biggest issues that people have to deal with in the email space, or if you go to Google, or if you go to Apple, you go to Microsoft, the biggest problem is phishing and account takeover, right? And in reality, that's going to be one of the ways in which you're going to get your coins stolen, is if someone breaks into your account, because maybe they have sim swapped your 2FA on your phone, right?

And we're actually very good at preventing account takeover, because that is, in many ways, part of our core business, which makes us unique in the crypto space. So I think the fact that we have things like pro non-set and all AI tools to look at account security, a big focus on account security, we're able to better block malicious takeover attempts of user accounts. And that gives one pillar of security.

The second pillar of security in crypto is the very famous phrase, not your keys, not your coins, right? And that's simply the notion that if you're not in control of your own encryption keys, if you're using, let's say, a custodial wallet, like the likes of Binance or FTX, then actually, your coins don't really belong to you. They can be taken from you.

They can be stolen from you by someone that, even if FTX wasn't stealing money off the top, someone else could have hacked in and stolen that money, right? So the second pillar of our design was to couple our strong account security also with solvacity. And this is the idea that your proton wallet account, the keys belong fully to you. It doesn't depend on us, because in fact, we don't have access to your keys.

And in fact, I prefer that as well, because it also makes proton a less appealing target. There is no centralized vault somewhere holding tons of Bitcoin that someone can break in and steal, right? It's decentralized in a solvacity way. And so that's, I think, the second pillar of the security standpoint. And we also did something that was a little bit controversial, but we also came out Bitcoin only at the very beginning. And the reason for this, there's many reasons for it, right?

But at the end of the day, part of the reason, I think, crypto in general has a reputation is that millions of people have lost billions, getting scammed doing all sorts of stuff, right? So I think also being Bitcoin only at the beginning, this reduces the risk of users coming in and actually losing substantial sums of money on things that maybe are not kosher. So I think that's how we look at it from a security standpoint.

And the fact that we are also open source, the fact that we're also based in Switzerland under Swiss legislation, the fact that everything that we do is being audited, the fact that there's protons in a ten year track record, and also the fact that we're not a crypto or Bitcoin company. We're not in the trading business. We're not doing staking. We're not investing. We're not gambling. We don't have an ICO.

We don't have some random coin that we've made that we're hawking and trying to make profit off of. Our business is security and privacy, and that's it. So that's, I think, the things that make us different from the security standpoint. And then, of course, there's all this around user experience. But this is why it took 10 years. And I think this is why our approach is a little bit different. It's not totally unique in the space, but it's rare to have all those elements together.

You can find maybe two or three elements together in one place, but to find them all in one offering, I think that's maybe where we can make a difference from a security standpoint. The great thing about Bitcoin is it does not matter if you are a nuclear physicist at CERN or a tech-illiterate boomer or somewhere in between, you can still keep your Bitcoin safe for the long haul when you have an easy-to-use hardware wallet, like the Bitbox O2.

Go to bitbox.swiss slash walker and use the promo code walker to get yourself 5% off the fully open source Bitcoin only Bitbox O2 hardware wallet or anything else in their store. Then, of course, get your Bitcoin off the exchange and into your own self-custody. I have really enjoyed working with the Bitbox team and their support of the show. They're an awesome group of people and they build easy-to-use secure open source solutions to keep your Bitcoin safe.

And not only is the Bitcoin in your Bitbox safe from government confiscation, let's say, but Bitbox is one of the only two wallets to actually address the dark, skipy vulnerability. So you're in luck if you have one. And if you don't, you can go to their website and get 5% off right now.

And I cannot emphasize this enough, but the Bitbox O2 is truly easy as hell to use, whether you are brand new to Bitcoin, it's your very first time setting up a hardware wallet, or you are a well-seasoned psychopath. It is Bitcoin only, and once again, it is fully open source. You can head to their GitHub and verify that for yourself. There's no need to trust me or Bitbox.

When you go to bitbox.swiss slash walker and use the promo code walker, not only do you get 5% off, but you also help support this fucking podcast. So thank you. I really appreciate the explanation on the why Bitcoin only as well, because that was when I posted this on Noster and on X just that I would be interviewing you and got some questions. And some of them were from folks in the crypto crowd, in quotation marks.

And one of the things was, well, when is there gonna be support for the other cryptocurrencies? And I think that's something that folks who are focused on solely Bitcoin, like myself and like Proton, is there's a recognition that, look, yes, some of these other things are, there may be some neat little use cases that you've developed, but ultimately they are not built on a solid foundation. They're, it's a castle built on sand versus a castle built on solid bedrock.

And using any of these inferior products, I think one of the points that you mentioned so, so crucial is, one of the reasons Bitcoin gets such a bad reputation often, I think a lot of this is changing, but it has certainly, is because it is lumped in with all of crypto, all of the scams. People hear Bitcoin and many of them who don't know any better think SPF was somehow in chart, the CEO of Bitcoin or something.

And so all of these scams, these bad headlines, all these pre-mines, all these ICOs, they all get lumped in and tarnished that reputation of Bitcoin, which is in fact, separate and different. And so I really applaud and appreciate the fact that you guys said, nope, we're gonna go Bitcoin only. Bitcoin is the choice here. And why focus on an inferior coin that also is not as, well, neither as decentralized nor as secure, nor as fair as Bitcoin. So I think that's great.

And one thing I wanna dig into a little bit with you here is you said, okay, Proton's not necessarily doing anything super, super new. But I think in one way that you guys really do seem to be innovating is this idea of sending Bitcoin to an email address. And sure, on the Lightning Network, you can have like your Lightning address.

I know I think maybe it was a little over a year ago, Michael Saylor announced that MicroStrategy was converting their corporate email addresses to Lightning addresses as well. So you have anyone's corporate email, you can also send them a Lightning payment. That's an incredible piece of interoperability. Lightning addresses are a really wonderful improvement to user experience built on top of LNURL. But you guys are talking about base chain Bitcoin being sent to an email address.

Can we get into that a little bit of kind of how that works if this is a good time for that? And just because, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think anyone else has done that in terms of actually having the email address be your ability to receive it. And then maybe we could talk a little bit about, okay, are you guys generating a new receive address for each time a transaction comes just from a privacy perspective?

Can we dig into that a little bit, just how that works and how you guys approached it? Yeah, having to jump into that. But actually I wanted to go back a little bit to the Bitcoin only, you know, a comment right? Oh please, please. And just add a bit of color there, right? It's not that Proton as a company is, you know, we're literally, you know, against any other coin, right? It's not that we want to just go out there and say, oh, you know, everything out there is a shit coin.

So that's not, let's say, our statement. The statement actually that when we look at this is a little bit more, you know, nuanced. And what it is, is the analogy I would give is going back to, you know, email, right? When we started email 2014. If you told me in 2014 to build the world's most secure, you know, communication system, the answer would not have been email. I would have built a, you know, a signal or something else, right? But what was critical is the network.

And email, because it is federated, which means that anybody can run their own email server and talk to the network, you know, as they wish, is not closed or owned by anybody. That actually has made it the most successful communication system that humans have ever devised, right? Everybody's got it. It's the most ubiquitous. It's the most common. And it will always be there to stay, despite 30 years of people saying email is dead. It's not dead, right? Even after 30 years.

So from that perspective, email was, let's say, the best technical choice, but it was the only choice if it really wanted to have an impact, right? So your option could be to build something new that maybe would not get widespread adoption, or you could take the thing that was already widely adopted and make it more secure. And, yeah, I kind of view the choice of Bitcoin as well from a similar lens.

If you told me today with all of hindsight and all the information that we've learned in the past, you know, 10 years or more to build the most secure and private cryptocurrency, the code probably wouldn't be the Bitcoin code that is running today on Bitcoin, right? It's probably something different. You know, maybe it might even be Monero or something along those lines, right? But the network is very important.

So if our goal is to have freedom of transaction, and financial sovereignty, and, you know, freedom, we have two choices, right? Yeah, it's kind of like with email. And the logical choice should be to go to the biggest network and make that more secure and more private, as opposed to building new networks, which may not have a critical mass and may not even get the network effect. And who knows, right? It's very possible that someday something new comes out that displaces S&TP and email.

Something new could also come out someday and, you know, displace Bitcoin. And if that happens, we're very happy to adapt and change and do things differently. But I do believe very strongly in focus, right? You wanna do things well. And from a business perspective, actually supporting all the possible points out there is better for business because it means more potential users, right?

But it will also probably mean a less good product because you're just spread too thin, and you're not focusing on the main use case. And I think that's probably a good segue into, you know, talking about Bitcoin via email, which is sort of the feature, right? It's, yeah. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, because of course, on security, actually it's possible for someone to do all the things that we've done right on security and replicate that.

The reason I think the Bitcoin via email feature is a little bit different is because there has not really been any company that has decided to go into Bitcoin that also happens to be an email company. Because quite frankly, there are not that many email companies out there to begin with, right? Most of them have actually been sold off in the last 20 years by Google and the tech giants.

So what we sort of realized is the main pain points if I wanted to send Bitcoin to my mother, and actually, my mother is sort of the target audience, right? That's a level of sophistication that we want to be able to build for, right? If you ask her to, okay, take a really long, head-steck small string, exchange it with somebody else, out of band, check each character one by one to make sure it's okay, and then do that again for every single transaction.

Because if you use the same thing over and over again, it's not private, right? And to keep the address that she has exchanged with every single person clear in her head, it's simply too much to ask for, right? I have to run, okay, did I give this address to this person, to that person? If I receive money in this address, who paid me? I see a string, but I don't know who it was, right? It's endlessly complicated. It simply doesn't work.

And what we realized is sending money in some sense, sending value, it's actually not too different from sending email. Why? Because when you send email, you want to make sure the person that received the message is actually the right person. You need to have a verification there involved.

So we were sort of in a unique position, given our knowledge of encryption and given our knowledge of Bitcoin from 10 years ago, plus the fact that we are a pretty significant email provider to actually combine the two. And we make fun of PayPal a bit at the beginning, right? But PayPal is actually an amazing product. With just an email address, you can send money and there could be any currency to anybody in the world. I mean, that is objectively incredible, right?

As long as they're not in a blacklisted country, let's say. Yes, exactly, right? As long as they're close on a lot, et cetera, et cetera, right? But fair, it is amazing. Yeah, so what if you could do that, but still preserve the properties of Bitcoin, which is the fact that no one can lock the funds, your money is your money, and it's decentralized, and it's not controlled by any central entity? So that was really the big vision and the big dream.

And with Proton Wallet, actually, we could disappear tomorrow and just vanish all the things on earth, and you would still have your coins, right? As long as you kept your recovery seed phase, that still belongs to you. So what we do is we take the Bitcoin address and we really associate it with the email system, because email encryption also is an exchange of keys, just like, you know, transacting with Bitcoin.

And what that basically means is, if I want to send you a Bitcoin, all I have to do is I just need to know your email address. I can type in your email address, type in the number of coins I wanna send you, click send, and it's done. And that, I think, is probably a quantum leap in terms of user experience, compared to what has existed in the past. And we put a lot of effort into making that also private, right?

So if I send you Bitcoin by email, if someone else does it, well, that's someone else is gonna see a different address, because we automatically pre-generate and rotate their addresses for you. So the thing of keeping the address is straight, this issue is solved, right? And because it's Bitcoin by email, when you receive money, you actually know who sent it to you.

And I think what is also the most powerful element of this is I don't even need to have been previously in touch with you and have an open communication channel with you in order to transact with you. I just simply need to know your email address, which maybe you have posted, you know, on your Twitter account or something like that, right? And if you post your Bitcoin address here, well, that's not very private, and everybody sees it and everybody goes the same address.

So actually you address that issue as well. And this is why I think it's a pretty significant innovation from a user experience standpoint. But what it also can do is it can solve one of the problems of scale. Today, there are some estimates that say there's probably 500 million crypto users overall, right? Of which probably most of them are Bitcoin, I would suspect. But with Proton Wallet, what we can actually do is we can add a Bitcoin Wallet into every single phone account.

So overnight, you can actually go from, you know, you can add 100 million to that existing 500 million, and that's an appreciable increase. And let's say anybody new to the space, you know, would like to participate and join the network. Well, is that as simple as creating a phone account?

And every single month, there are millions of people who create a phone account because maybe they want the email, maybe they want the VPN, maybe they want the false storage, maybe they want the password manager. All these people that enter our ecosystem are now also going to be added into the Bitcoin ecosystem. So I think that ease of use combined with the scale has a multiplying effect, which can actually, in the long run, significantly increase adoption.

It'll take some time, but I think that's potential. And this is why we thought, okay, we're sort of in a unique position to address our core issue with PayPal, money being blocked, and not feeling very secure for digital finance, but also really open up the space more broadly. And this is really the vision, and this is why we built it the way that we built it.

It's fascinating, first of all, one of the pieces that you mentioned about just that out of band communication, I think is so vital because you're right, okay, you've got the freedom to transact, right, with Bitcoin. Great, you cannot be censored from completing a transaction, but you need to coordinate to make that transaction.

You need some sort of secure way to ensure that the person you're communicating with is actually the person you intend to send the money to, that they're not somehow being spoofed, and you need to make sure that those messages are not somehow being altered along the way, that there's not a new address being inserted into your communication somehow because if you're using some centralized provider, and some big brother or company is watching, well, then you don't actually have certainty

that you are in fact communicating with who you're communicating with. But this provides that parallel channel, I think, and I would say that the freedom to, I mean, this is ultimately free speech, right, the freedom to communicate, that has to go hand in hand with the freedom to transact, or it becomes far less powerful.

And so I think that that's beautiful, and thank you for addressing the address part as well, because I know one of the big things I've seen as pushback on Proton has been, well, you're associating an email address with a Bitcoin address, that's the worst thing ever for privacy, et cetera, et cetera.

But in this case, this is, you guys are basically automating, improving the user experience of not having address reuse, which if anyone, you know, anybody who's deep into Bitcoin will tell you, address reuse is the worst thing you can do for your privacy, right?

Because then it becomes trivially simple to be able to associate that, maybe not with you potentially, but with that persona, to at least say, these UTXOs all belong to whoever this individual is, and then maybe there's other ways that you can figure out actually the real world identity of that individual. So again, for anyone listening, there are no address reuse, you're generating a new receive address, and I think that that's really powerful.

I'm curious what other pushback you guys have seen on this, is that the biggest one of kind of privacy with the assumption that you're associating a single Bitcoin receive address with a single email? So how can that be good? Or are there other things you guys see a lot? Well, actually, there's actually maybe a bit more context I can add to that, right? Sure, that'd be great. With a personal account, if you have a paid account, for example, you can actually generate multiple email addresses.

So you could actually create a new address, not associated with your regular address, your user code correspond, in order to use just for Bitcoin by email, right? This is a possibility. But also Bitcoin by email is not mandatory, that's an optional feature. So you could just opt out of it and say, I don't want this on my account, I wanna do it the old fashioned way. And that may, so basically, you retain a choice of kind of how you wanna set it up.

And I believe in letting users have the choice, because every threat model is different, right? For some people, and I would say for most people, having an easy way to verify who you're sending money to is probably more important than ensuring that you're completely anonymous and no one can track you and whoever, right? But because things are optional, you have both choices, right? You can use it the way that you want, depending on what problem you needed to actually solve.

So I think even in the early days of Proton Mail, and even to Proton Wallet, there will always be people who are, let's say more absolute in their views of privacy, who will say, oh, this is not as secure, right? And when did email, in the beginning, yes, you could, for example, use a one-time pad, and that would be objectively more secure, but it has a user experience problem associated with that.

And what I kind of responded to people that were complaining about Proton Mail back 10 years ago was, you know what? Yes, you're an expert BGP user, and that's good, but you're not actually my target audience, not because I don't care about you, I do, right? But actually because you're not the one that most needs our help, right?

Our mission is to actually get the other 99.9% that without better technology to make it easier to use, simply will not have the option to have the benefits that you have because you're tech savvy.

And so it's similar, I think, in Proton Wallet, is that for the ones who are hard-core big-curs that know how things work, have their paper wallets, or their metal wallets etched and buried in the backyard somewhere, we would love to get you as a user actually, because I believe the easy use benefits are still good for you, but you're not really the ones that need help, right? It's everybody else that actually needs help.

Coming back to the question of the biggest pushback, the biggest pushback was probably from the non-Bitcoin crowd that was quite frustrated that we were not adding support for their favorite coin, whichever it is, and there are a hundred variants of this, right? And I get it, right?

It's a financial decision for a lot of people, a lot of people are heavily invested into these coins, and of course, having them integrating the Proton ecosystem, having the potential to have their favorite coin, and it'll gain a hundred million users over the next year, that probably would have been good for whatever coin they were deeply invested in, right? But it's a resource thing. I simply cannot support every single coin out there.

It's a lot of resources to do one coin well, and who you also don't remember is most of the people in the Proton ecosystem, they're there because they trust us. And if I were to propose any of these hundreds of coins, and someone were to buy that and get wiped out because it was a rug pole, the scam, it was whatever, ultimately you could say it's not Proton's fault, right? But the user won't view it that way. The user's gonna blame it on us.

So I think it needs to be highly selective, create a list. I think recently, there's some price tips in Bitcoin Wallet, right? And even then, when you use a complaint, hey, you promoted this thing on us, and then I lost some money, are you gonna compensate me for that, right? So that's always the risk that we have to think about as well, and which is why I think let's do the Bitcoin Wallet very well, right?

And I think it has potential to become the best Bitcoin Wallet out there, and then when we reach that point, then let's discuss about other things, right? No, absolutely, and I'm kind of curious as well, because this, so you mentioned that you guys are open source, I assume Proton Wallet will also be open source. So are you guys thinking at all about interoperability? In terms of, obviously, as you mentioned, there aren't too many email providers these days, the number dwindles and consolidates.

But is that something you guys are thinking about at all in terms of, okay, I wanna be able to have this spec be able to be implemented by others, whether or not they would is a different story, but just theoretically, somebody like Gmail say, wants to implement the spec to be able to say, okay, you can now use your Gmail address as a receive address, are you guys thinking about that at all, or is it too kind of early stage for that? I don't think it requires a spec, actually, right?

Because Bitcoin is already very open, emails are already very open. We didn't go to IETF and get an RFC to standardize everything, but it is public, what we do and how we do it. And I think anybody that wanted to could build on top of that and build something to battle with that, right? So if there is, let's say, broader interest from the broader tech community in standardizing this, it's something we could take the IETF, we could start to standardize it.

But yeah, I don't really quite see the big mainstream email providers jumping into the space or in this direction. It's not aligned with their business model, right? They're not really for privacy or anonymity because that's not possible for them, right? So it's maybe somebody probably gets so successful and so many users, they're forced to do a degree with this and they have future parity, maybe, right? But that's probably quite far down the road.

So it is possible, but we're not actually going out there and trying to say, you know, convince Gmail to adopt this. It's, it didn't seem like it would be good use for our time right now and I think it became an uphill battle. I think that's a fair assessment. And just speaking of Gmail and kind of these other, Microsoft, the other behemoths out there, I mean, because you guys, it really is like a David versus multiple Goliaths in this case.

And only a few Goliaths left, but I'd love to talk a little bit about just your deeper ethos, both you, but then also Proton as an organization because I think again, for a lot of people, the freemium model was very popular for a while. Like, oh, great, this service is free. You know, if an app cost money on the app store, it's like, well, I'm not going to do that. I can just get a free app.

People expected software, they expected applications, expected services to be free because that was the model for so long that was pervasive, not realizing that there is no such thing as a free lunch and that in fact, you know, they're not the user, they're the product, you know, they're not the customer, I should say, they are the user, but they're not the customer.

How, you know, you guys have obviously been very successful with a model of we built something that we are going to charge you money for because we're not going to scrape your data. Was that really always kind of the plan? What is the Ethos Bind Pro? And how do you guys think about this and how does that compare to the free, but not really free, other options that are out there for people? Yeah, I think that's a good point, right? You know, nothing is actually free.

So, you know, when you get Google for free, it's not free. You're paying me the most intimate, sensitive and important information, right? And it's kind of, as you say, yes, you're Google's user, but yeah, you're the product being sold to the actual customer who is the advertiser. And so I view it philosophically from a perspective of alignment of interest because our interests as a company, and now even as a nonprofit, has to be aligned with the interests of the customer.

And in Google's business, there is no such alignment. If some weird bargain where it's like, I hope you don't read my terms and conditions and realize the horrible things I'm doing, then I'm gonna exploit your data to satisfy my real customers and abuse your privacy as a user. It's a shitty bargain, it's a shitty deal. And I like sort of a more honest and a more straightforward business model. People pay Proton for one reason, because it protects their privacy.

And that's also very important the other way around because you're paying us to protect your privacy. My only incentive is to keep protecting your privacy. The internet, do something else, I've actually destroyed my whole business. So even if you didn't trust me and you instead trust the capitalism, I'm actually financially incentivized to protect your privacy. And that I think is the strongest alignment that you can actually obtain in business. And that is stable.

That's something that can persist and last for a long time. And there's longevity to that. So I think that is the alignment of interest that I find to be fundamental to everything else. But then beyond that, there's also company culture. And culture really comes a lot of times, not just from the founders, but also from the early employees and from the early team. And company culture in many ways is who you hire, fire, and promote.

And I would say we approach on have a really unique culture because most of us that started this project wouldn't do it for the money. We did it because we truly believed in the mission. And that's a very scientific thing. No one goes to science for money to do it because you believe in the challenge, you believe in the problem that you're solved and you think it will benefit mankind.

So, and then that culture sort of persists over time because the ones that you will bring in and hire and bring on to your staff, well, they tend to think in the same way. Also because we're not going to try to offer the highest salaries in the market. We're not gonna completely Google. It's not really possible to compete on a cash basis. So if people come to join Proton, and a lot of them in fact have come from Google and the AT&T companies, right?

Generally, they're not taking, well, we're not saying take a massive pay cut, but they do take a bit of a pay cut, at least on a cash perspective to come here. And that's also a self-study process. It means you're studying the people that fundamentally value a bit moral and ethics and what is right versus wrong as opposed to profit. And that allows you to perpetuate that within your business over time. And that's also kind of why Google has gone wrong.

Cause people that have a strong moral compass, they're not going to join a company that doesn't have any sense of morals, doesn't understand it right or wrong, right? So Google actually over time will tend to attract the more mercenary personalities who are profit at any cost at all costs. And you see how that kind of culture has evolved the business over the past 20 years from do no evil to do any evil as long as it's profitable. So it's also a divergence in culture.

And at Proton, what we've done in the past couple of months is we formalize that. They were actually structuring it as a nonprofit now. So having a nonprofit be the main shareholder of the company, it takes what was already more or less true, but it makes it now legally binding, which is, it's not really an assurance that I really thought I needed it as I was confident in our direction and our culture.

But I think for the broader community as a whole, it's a way of saying Proton is making a lasting legal commitment to respect these values over the long term. And I think that was why it was a very important move to do. It wasn't easy to do, but it was far easier to do it at Proton than say at a place like Google, right? And so I'm glad we did it in the end.

And that's, it's a perfect transition there because that was literally the next thing I wanted to ask you about was, that's a really interesting move. I mean, you're obviously have a massive user base. Again, we're talking 100 million plus users. I'm assuming several hundred employees, I mean, a pretty big operation and global. A lot of people would look at this and say, well, okay, the next step is obviously we've got to take this thing public. Maybe we've got to raise a few funding rounds.

I think you said initially you didn't take any VC money at all. Is that correct? Yeah, Proton doesn't have any VC investors today. So it's not a venture-backed company. Like most of the company is out there. Which is quite rare for a technology company these days. I mean, it's really rare. And can you talk about, I mean, so the, just because I'm curious, the structure of the nonprofit.

So is it an outside nonprofit that then came in and is the majority shareholder or was a new nonprofit created kind of out of Proton, which now has that controlling interest? How does that work? Yeah, it was printed out of Proton. Okay. There were no controlling outside shareholders to involve in the process. So basically it was myself, the founding team, essentially, who made the decision that actually, we want to preserve product values over the long term.

And we didn't get in the business to make money at the beginning. So we're not, say, waiting on an IPO or some big trade sale later on down the road to get rich and retire to a boat somewhere. Some people, for them, that's important, but it wasn't, let's say, the main focus here. So we set up the structure in this way because foundations are permanent. People can leave, people can die, people can, things happen, right?

But a foundation with a legally binding bylaw, that actually perpetuates over time and that gives long-term certainty. And I think this is kind of important because in the privacy space, we've seen companies get shut down, we've seen companies get bought by others who had different set of morals and values. I think you mentioned use ExpressVPN, right? ExpressVPN was bought some time ago by a new company, which some people didn't trust in the same way as the previous company, right?

And these things can happen in business. This is part of business, part of life. And I think what our structure does is it prevents facts. It ensures that Proton remains independent and focusing on a mission over the long term. And that's, I think, an important guarantee that we need to make to the community. And it is a bit unique. Now, there's an interesting kind of dichotomy here, right? Because nonprofits can also go wrong.

So if you look broadly at the role of nonprofits today, you have things like Signal, Mozilla, Tor, in fact, there's plenty of nonprofits. And so I don't actually believe that Proton, even though we're structured today with a nonprofit as the controlling shareholder, we should not actually forget about profit. In fact, I think it's very important for us to keep profits at the center. And I'll give you an example here.

I've actually got a lot of respect for the folks at Mozilla, but it's not a secret. Mozilla today's main source of funding is from Google, the same company that is its main competitor and is trying to kill privacy globally, right? If you look at Tor, a big chunk of their funding comes from the USA Department, comes from the government, right?

And there's also plenty of nonprofits out there that are donation-based, which is not really sustainable and may make you make compromises that in the end, don't give us a certainty that you'll be around 10, 20, 30, 100 years from now. So what is interesting about Proton's nonprofit structure is at the heart of a nonprofit is actually a profitable company. It seems like a paradox, but actually it's not because it's the best way to self-reinforce the nonprofit structure, right?

Because the heart and the core asset of our nonprofit is a profitable company. That is the tool that gives the nonprofit the inability to do anything. That's the nonprofit, the independence that it needs to safeguard the mission overall. So people, they say, oh, it's a paradox, it doesn't make any sense, but actually it's a self-reinforcing and it's not a paradox, it's actually completely aligned. So transition to the structure doesn't mean that we don't care about profits.

Actually, we need to probably care even more about profits because that is a thing that will ensure the long-term independence of the proton nation. It's a bit of a paradox, it's a bit confusing, but if you think it through, it actually makes perfect sense. It also makes sense because we're trying to take on the Googles of the world who have hundreds of billions in cash.

And even if they're completely wrong for their vision of the internet, even if the average person out there in the street doesn't agree with what they're doing and agrees more with our vision, in the end, money matters, resources matter. So we do need to also be able to match that. I think we can be a lot smarter, a lot more efficient, a lot more agile, and we can frankly also work a lot harder than they can to close the gap. But you're not going to close $100 billion gap this way.

You also need probably billions on your own to do that as well. So profits is another vehicle in which we drive change. And this is why proton continues to have a very strong business focus, a very strong business mindset. Because without that, I don't think our mission works. So it seems a little bit like a paradox, but it's actually self-reinforcing and consistent. What do you think it through? No, I think it makes perfect sense.

I wasn't exactly sure where you were going with it at first, but this made a lot more sense. Now, it's essentially the idea. It goes back to the incentives you talked about. The incentive to deliver. Like you are selling a privacy service to your customers. Your incentive is to deliver that privacy service because then you will retain and grow your customer base.

If you want to be able to do that independent of, let's say, State Department funding or funding from Google, well, you need to be profitable. You need to be delivering that best service to your customers. And that delivering that best service is what allows you to remain independent because it allows you to be the most profitable. So I think it's perfectly consistent there.

And I'm curious because I saw a couple of people in the comments make mention of, oh, a proton used to have some World Economic Forum members on their board. And I wanted to bring this up because full disclosure, I did not go down a deep rabbit hole or anything like that. But I saw people bring this up. And so clearly it's a concern some folks have. They see World Economic Forum. And they, for I think many times, very fair reasons, get a little bit leery. Can you address that at all?

Just so we can kind of maybe put some of these things to bed? Or what's the, yeah, let's talk about it. Yeah, of course. So actually, World Economic Forum is based in Geneva, which is where we're based. I guess that's more fodder for the conspiracy theorists. But let's put it out there. So I'm going to get everybody knows. And I've been to actually a few of their events just out of curiosity. I'm not a member of anything because actually, I can't afford to be a member. It costs too much.

And look, if there's some global conspiracy around WEF, I can tell you this. There are not any for an organized enough or effective enough for that to be the case. So no, Proton is not affiliated with WEF. I'm not a member of WEF. We did win one of their startup prizes some years ago. But we're not a member. We're not a card game member. We don't pay any dues.

And yes, there is, I think people mentioned there was one born member at the corporation level, not the foundation level, who formerly was part of some, chaired some community working group there. But this is formally, and it's not there anymore. So people said, oh, well, your website was changed. But actually, if someone changes their role and is not involved somewhere anymore, then you make a change there. So it's a no. There's no lizard people sitting behind this cartoon controlling Proton.

It's not how it works. I appreciate the context there. Because again, I wanted to ask it, because I think it's always better to put these out in the open. And so I appreciate the candid response there. And yeah, Javier Malay went and spoke at the World Economic Forum. So I don't think he's a lizard person. But they may have a few of them back there, who can say. But I don't think that curtain looks too small to hide any today. So I appreciate it.

Yeah, the thing is they have such about reputation, because they never refuted the issue. And actually, WEF, it represents what a lot of people don't like. It represents the savage. It represents big government, big business. And rightfully so, because it's mostly funded by these giant corporations. So I think they get a lot of criticism. But yeah, from what I've seen, maybe I wasn't allowed into the inner part. So maybe I don't know. Maybe something's going on there.

But yeah, I don't think they're nearly as organized to be, as let's say, it's not a secret thing where they're controlling pulling strings behind the scenes. I didn't get the sense. But of course, we have no affiliation with them. Quite frankly, for the fees that they would want to be part of that, we will probably better invest that money elsewhere, let's say. I think that's a very fair statement. So a little gear switch, just something kind of off topic.

But I noticed that both Proton Mail and Proton Wallet had Noster and Pubz. They were on Noster, I think. I mean, for a decent amount of time now, was that something where you guys just a couple of people within the organization saw Noster, saw this distraction happening and thought, OK, this is something we should take a look at. Are there any plans in the future, I guess? Do you see any part of the Noster protocol that can be used in conjunction with Proton's own tech stack?

Or for now, is it just a way of kind of another means of distributing information? Yeah, I think there's a tech question. And then there's the community question, right? We're here to serve the community, because in the end, the community is the only stakeholders that matter to Proton. There's no external investors. It's just a community. And now with the nonprofit, the community literally is the stakeholder. It's the sort of benefit of the world that we're here to serve.

And what that means is we will go where our community is. So there was a time when they were on Macedon and we went there as well. If they're on Noster, we'll go there as well. If there's something new that comes up five years from now, we'll go there as well. Now, unfortunately, a lot of them are on TikTok, right? So probably we have to go there too. Who knows, right? But our mission is to communicate, to educate, and to serve the people. And we are where the people are.

This is all there is to it. Now, the technical question is very interesting. And that's where I put my engineer hat on, my scientist hat on, right? I think there's always a problem that you want to solve for the product. It's a user pain point of some sort. And many years ago, people asked us, oh, why don't you do decentralized email and run email on blockchain and do storage on Filecoin or whatever? I mean, there's tons of these in the past, right?

It would be in keeping with protons, DNA, of being independent from any central control. If it's proton, go and do it. And my response is always, what is the problem that I'm trying to solve for the customer? And what is the technical requirement that comes from that problem? And what is the best analogy to solve it? And in the case of storage, I can tell you, the best analogy wasn't Filecoin, right?

There were much better ways to, and much more, and by better, I mean, more cost-effective, more efficient, more reliable, faster to build ways of providing secure storage to proton customers. Because why? The fact that the storage is centralized is not the main issue for reliability, right? The fact that you hold your own keys, and I don't have a central key chain of all your keys, that's actually the main security benefit.

So it doesn't have to go on Filecoin in order for you to have the benefits of security and privacy that we promised, right? So if there is a situation where no support or call is technically the best solution, then we will adopt it. But it has to win on its technical merits. It cannot be ideological. It cannot be a brand. It cannot be a fad or a trend. There's a time when putting Bitcoin or crypto or something in your pitch may your company try to be valuable, right?

And then that went away very quickly. Nowadays, AI makes everything better, apparently, right? But no, I think only when it's the best technical solution. And if you take it from a long-term view, and Proton is not in the business to chase fads, our main owners are non-profit, doesn't have a timeline where it needs to exit, right? In fact, the whole point is never exit. We don't need to chase fads.

We just need to chase what is technically the best solution, and this is consistently what we do all the time. A fair response. You have to lead with what is the pain point that you are trying to solve for. Otherwise, you end up kind of spinning your wheels and building something that maybe isn't really necessary. Yes, yes.

It was like when crypto came out, I would say nine out of 10 things that were being built on the random blockchains probably could have been built better off a blockchain, right? But they did it because it was, well, you could scam people out of the money more easily this way, right? So this is why they did it. But it was definitely not technically the best solution. And a lot of these projects are starting to pivot now. And I think to myself, what a massive waste of capital.

If they had raised that money legitimately in a different way, didn't bother the blockchain stuff and did it in the best technical way, they'd be so much further along the roadmap by now. So yeah, I think it's a must-take to get caught up in different tech trends and different tech fads. Agreed. And I think the number of things that could have probably been done more efficiently in a centralized database versus crypto might be closer to 999 out of 1,000.

But yeah, just given the sheer volume of tokens there are now, speaking of roadmaps, though, just for Proton, one of the other questions that I got a few times was about lightning network integration for the Proton wall. And obviously, there are some major hurdles. You mentioned that user experience is really at the forefront for you guys. How are you guys thinking about any potential future lightning implementations? Is this something that you guys are looking at right now?

Is it something that you're kind of, it's a wait and see sort of thing? Because presumably people will keep asking about it. Obviously, the lightning network has a ton of benefits and trade-offs, obviously. But it also has a lot of difficulties as far as running a self-custodial option. You can also use LSPs and things like that. But how are you guys thinking about the lightning network? Is it on your radar, I guess would be the first question. Well, it's for sure on the radar. We like the idea.

And why? The biggest problem with Bitcoin is transaction costs too high and also too slow because the speed is also a factor. So if you can bring transaction costs down to essentially nothing with instantaneous settlement, then the potential use case of Bitcoin network multiplies exponentially. It can now be a means of settlement as opposed to just a means of investment or store value or wherever you will use it for. So we want to do lightning. It's definitely something that we're keen to do.

But there's then the trade-offs again. We talked about the pillars of security and self-custody with one of those main pillars that we thought very strongly about. Today, if you want to use lightning, the main user benefit, let's say, this is generalizing a bit, but the main user benefit is actually lower transaction fees. But if you're forced to open and close and serve your own channels because you're self-custody, actually, you don't really gain that benefit. That benefit is a lot smaller.

So actually, self-custody and lower transaction fees and lightning, they are unfortunately today a little bit mutually exclusive. And there are plenty of smart people, probably far smarter than me, who are spending a lot of time thinking about this and still thinking about it. And they'll probably eventually crack it, but we're not quite there yet. And proton, because of our big focus on security, privacy, but also any of our big part of security is actually reliability, stability, resilience.

We're never going to be actually the first adopters. And you also shouldn't want us to be the first adopters, because that actually goes against the ethos of proton, of our security. In fact, if you think about Bitcoin in general, we got to Bitcoin later than BlackRock, which is kind of insane if you think about it. But that's sort of our mindset. We want things to be secure, stable, resilient, reliable, and safe. And that usually doesn't mean being the first to run into a space.

So I think I'm confident that one day we will get self-custody lightning and user experience problem solved. But we don't necessarily want to be the pioneers, to be the first to do that, because the first to do that are going to make a lot of mistakes. And we tend to like to let things mature a little bit. And I think there's been other things in Bitcoin, as well specifically, that are kind of at the forefront, not just lightning. People have asked us, oh, how do you implement X, Y, and Z?

And my answer is, well, it's not even version of Bitcoin Core. So how can you expect me to support it? It's simply too risky. There's bugs, and we don't want users to lose money. So we'll get there, but it's a tough one. And lightning, I think it's unfortunately, OK, I'm going to get some flak for this, but I think it's just not ready for prime time yet, but it's getting there. Oh, yeah. I think that that's a fair response.

The way I look at lightning is because I've set up multiple lighting nodes using different implementations. I've tried literally dozens of different lightning wallets. And the reality of the situation is that a custodial lightning wallet is far superior from an ease of use perspective. It's just the reality. When somebody else is handling all of that for you and they have big, fat channels open with all of the other providers, your experience is great. You can send large amounts.

You don't have to worry about channel opening and closing. And the payments always go through. The payments don't fail. And yes, a lot of people, custodial lightning is a shit coin. It's like, well, again, everything has trade-offs. Everything has trade-offs. And personally, I'm willing to keep a few sats in a custodial lightning wallet because it's a trade-off for convenience. And that's a trade-off I'm willing to make. I'm not putting any life savings in there, certainly.

And it's the same things with other layer two or three type solutions like federated eCash, where, yes, you could get rubbed by the mint, right? Or cash you can get rubbed by the mint. Federation or federated eCash get rubbed by the federation. But again, there are trade-offs. You're trading off with eCash near perfect or perfect privacy for the potential to be rubbed. And again, that's the beauty of Bitcoin is that it can be built in these layers. Nobody can rug you on the base layer.

That's the beauty of it, right? And so that's the place to start. But I think what's nice about the way you guys are positioned and kind of not trying to be the early adopters is you will benefit from all the incredible development that is going on right now and will be tested thoroughly over the coming years and can kind of pick and choose to say, here's what makes the most sense for our users.

Something like a paywall that you need to spend Bitcoin to be able to send an email to somebody seems like a potential future implementation that you could do very nicely with lightning or with eCash. But you need to have the tools in place to be able to do it so that it aligns with how you guys with your ethos, basically. And I think the answer will be probably hybrid, right?

It's if you're setting, let's say, a million dollars worth, you probably don't care about the $1 transaction fee of the base layer, right? And with that amount of money, you don't want to get robbed. You don't want to get stolen. You don't want to get you don't want to email you to just screw you over. You're happy to pay the dollar on the base layer. But let's say you're tipping $0.05 to some publisher somewhere, some writer, some blogger, who you thought, OK, that was great. I love the story.

I want to kick back on some tips there, right? That can be lightning, in fact. So it may actually be that you put most of your money in the base layer, proton wallet, and you do base transaction with base layer. And then you have a smaller custodial lightning, proton wallet, where you have a smaller amount of money. And it's money that you know, it's like money you have in your wallet, right? You might get mugged, but it's probably not the end of the world if you get your wallet stolen.

And that might be the medium that we need to strike. So it's a combination of what we have today, plus custodial lightning for other use cases. It's a licensing nightmare. I can tell you that, right? Oh, yeah. Because once again, at custody, it's a different ball game.

But I think something like that is probably the direction that we go, as opposed to trying to be insisting on self-custody and lightning at the same time, because I think that's probably not very practical, or is it realistic in the near term? Yeah. I think that's fair. And so we've covered a lot today. Is there anything else with regard to the wallet that we failed to touch on? Anything else that we should clarify? Did we do a pretty good, broad coverage of it?

Yeah, I think we covered quite a bit. So this is probably a, and also in the end, proton is responsible to the community. So if we didn't answer the question that you had, find us on Twitter or X, go to our wallet subreddits, ask us there. Well, you're our customer and our user. So we're obliged to answer you, right? So we're happy to take more questions, of course. One of the questions that comes up quite a bit is, when is the waiting list going away?

When are we going to make a general availability, when everybody come on? And I don't know the answer, right? But what I can say is, we're hoping this year. So for those on waiting lists, we're working on inviting you as quickly as possible. Actually, the demand was way more than we anticipated. And look, it's not easy to get 100 million people on the Bitcoin, right? It's, you know, you want to do that correctly. So thank you for your patience.

We're doing our best to get it as quickly as possible. And yeah, we hope you'll come and try out Proton Wallet one day and see how it's a bit different. I love it. Unrelated question, what makes you hopeful about the future? There's a lot of darkness and people get very nihilistic about things, but you seem to be a very positive. Well, I guess, you know, also, I just realized the name Proton makes a lot more sense now that I know that you were a physicist.

So it's a very positively charged atmosphere, it seems there. Yes, yeah. It could have been electron, right? But that would have been too negative. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's a joke, guys. I don't think I am particularly a positive person overall, right? In fact, you'll meet a lot of tech founders that have kind of drunk their own Kool-Aid and has gotten to their heads and basically promise a world. But I think also, Proton turns 10 this year, right? It turned 10 this summer.

And 10 years is a long time in tech. It's like a lifetime. At 10, you're practically a dinosaur. But unlike the dinosaurs, you also survive distinction, right? Because most tech companies don't make it a 10, because 9 out of 10 of them got a business. So what I think is not a certain optimism, it's more a certain resilience. And my main resilience is, of course, there will be more challenges to come.

But we have, as an organization, dealt with so much shit over the past decade that we're just not so scared about the future, because a lot of bad things have already happened. We've already been through all the ups, but also a lot of the downs as well. And I think the resilience makes you a little bit better equipped to deal with the uncertainty, the chaos, the negativity, and the problem in the world out there. Because you're clear eyed on your vision.

And I actually believe what we're doing at Proton, we're on the right side of history. I think we're doing something that is actually better for the world. And I believe the average person out there on the streets, if you ask them, if you like Google's vision of the future of the internet versus Proton vision, they like our vision actually. So there's a resilience that comes from 10 years of experience and 10 years of ups, but also very deep downs.

Combine that with the fact that I think we're doing the right thing and we're on the right side. So that's probably what gives me the optimism that you perceive. And there is something to be said for being right. If you're right in the long run, you're probably going to win. It could take a long time. But I think there's a lot of power to being right. And maybe this is the message that I will leave the audience with.

If you're right and you're doing the right thing, things will generally work out. My experience of the past 10 years. I think that's fantastic advice. And last question, I promise. But are you reading anything right now that you would recommend? I always like to ask just in case some interesting recommendations come out. At the current moment, no, and a lot of my readings is different team management books, which I can't really recommend because it's a very eclectic topic.

But some good books that I've read recently, there's a proton user. He's actually an activist from Hong Kong called Nathan Law. And he wrote a book that was basically his life story, how he went from fighting democracy in Hong Kong, became one of the youngest legislators I've ever elected. And the whole story about how freedom disappeared in Hong Kong in a span of a couple of years.

I found that to be really a quite good book because here in Switzerland or out in the US or in Western Europe, you can't really imagine these freedoms disappearing. But yet, our democracy and our freedom is incredibly fragile. And when you read a book like that, that's from someone who has seen it in a place where freedom actually vanished overnight, you get a sense that what we're fighting for is actually quite important.

And it's worth fighting for because these freedoms take for granted today, they're really, really fragile. And we can lose them in an independent way. And laws can change, people can change, governments can change. One thing that doesn't change, no matter how hard you try, and I know because I'm a physicist, is the laws of mathematics. So I like the fact that we ensure freedom through math. And this is something that I can rely on.

And this is something that I'm confident to go out to users and say, you're safe because I'm math. I can't imagine a more perfect note to end on than that, Andy. This was really a pleasure to talk to you. Great to take a peek behind the curtain and just understand how you guys operate and hear this story. I think people are really going to enjoy this. And I appreciate you guys making yourself so open to questions about this from the community. I'll link your details as well.

But otherwise, should people just go to your website to find out more info? Anywhere else you want to send them? Yeah, I think our website has a lot of information. But also Twitter, Reddit, Word Theater, in the community, quite active. It's pretty easy to find us, let us know what you think. And ultimately, our roadmap is what people ask for. So you tell us what you want, and we will build it. Of course, within the constraints of our business.

So you can tell us that build an ad system and to do an ad business model not going to happen. But other requests, we're happy to honor. Good to know. And folks can find you on Find Proton Wallet and Proton Mail on No Stairs as well, which is great, because I know we have a lot of listeners who are deep into that as well. So, Annie, thank you so much for your time. This was a pleasure. And really looking forward to trying Proton Wallet out as the latest piece of my Proton stack.

Yes, well, thanks for having me on the show. And always have to come on and answer some questions. Thanks so much. I'm just going to go. And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin Podcast. If you are a Bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast, head to bitcoinpodcast.net slash sponsor.

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