ProtonMail Now Supports Bitcoin Payments(protonmail.com) |
ProtonMail Now Supports Bitcoin Payments(protonmail.com) |
Any users like it ?
The whole google memo revealed google employees are not as trustworthy as I thought. All the social media talk of blacklists, and inquisition tactics from some of upper management is bad for business.
I've already gotten emails from clients asking me to change their business google services to something else (anything else in their own words).
I've switched to Mailbox.org in 2016 and I'm very happy with their product and service: Their system is based on an open-source solution (OpenExchange) so they don't need to reinvent the wheel and can focus on prodiving good hosting and service (which they do). They also have support for 2FA (including hardware tokens like Yubikeys) and recently revamped their management portal, which allows you to easily create and manage e-mail accounts for your employees.
Source: https://protonmail.com/blog/encrypted-email-for-organization...
What you get with mailbox.org that you don't get with ProtonMail:
* IMAP and SMTP
* Support for hardware 2FA dongles like Yubikey
* Ability to use your own GPG keys
* Very capable mail filter config tool
* Calendaring and contacts (with nice URLs so it's easy to use on Android via DAVdroid instead of Google's stuff)
* File storage
* Web-based spreadsheet, word processor and presentation tool
(Also who runs privacytools.io? Is he/she reputable?)
I was going to use fastmail, but ProtonMail's inbox encryption seemed like a nice bonus. I know it is not really securing my email, but it is nice to know that if they get a subpoena or warrant they cannot just dump my inbox. At least not without compromising their product - an active step.
Setup of domains and accounts is slick. Changing payment plans all works online, pro-rating and all.
I have a lot of email/domain combinations and most places charge per domain which makes it super expensive super quick.
Last I checked into the status, they only planned to support it for business accounts and limited sending to only a few aliases.
And keep in mind that even though your email is encrypted within PM, it is not encrypted on the mail servers of the people you have been communicating with (unless they are also PM accounts). So the primary attraction is largely moot.
I hope they catch up in the areas I think they need improvement, but providing Gmail level service is quite difficult unless you're big and well funded.
What made you feel this way, specifically, in the memo?
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-engineer-stalked-teens...
Mailpile is an email client (MUA) so you will need a server (MTA). At first you can try it out with your regular ISP, even Gmail. Later you can set up your own server. Setup is a little involved but much less than people tell you and, if you choose a competently run distro, requires very little ongoing maintenance.
With your own server, you can have it working exactly as you like. Export feature? No problem, you have direct access to the maildir, mailbox or the database. Want a catch-all? One switch in the config. You will have little trouble finding a provider who accepts your preferred method of payment, too.
Sure, you can find the web client sources. How about the server, and the mobile apps? The website makes a big deal of them being open source after all ( https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-open-source/ ).
Anybody make the switch?
I only use it for a small fraction of my business, though.
The Export feature has been an open request since before March 2015.
Another feature which would give users a way to get their mail out of PM is the ability to check mail from a client like Outlook or Thunderbird. That has been an open feature request since before February 2015.
They, as with other companies that refuse to listen to their customers, will eventually fail. Of course failure may mean being bought by a larger competitor (and a few of the bad decision-makers cashing out)...
How exactly... by paying with Bitcoin?
And this is coming from a security-conscious company?
Unless I mined the Bitcoins myself, and never spent the remaining 12.45 BTC that I mined (after presumably spending 0.05 BTC on protonmail)... it is far from "Anonymous".
If they started accepting Zcash, however...
Monero would be a better option.
I don't know a ton about Zcash or Monero, I only know that Zcash advertises and actually produces truly anonymous transactions (that the founders can unmask, or so I have read).
Is Monero anonymous as well? For every transaction? Or only specific ones (like Zcash).
[1]: https://www.coindesk.com/ostk-hodl-overstock-keep-50-bitcoin...
Are there major products out there priced in Bitcoin yet?
That's because the companies that accept bitcoin as payment have their own expenses, and it's unlikely that most of their bills can be paid by bitcoin.
It's easier to understand if you imagine your businesses in your country allowing you to buy products at a fixed price in some other country's currency.
You can check quite recent truly and honestly made (!) comparison of VPNs here: https://vpnreport.org/
Disclaimer: There are no affiliate links in this comment.
(!) not shown within first 10 google results among the usual crap for 'best xxx services'
[0] https://www.ovpn.com/en/blog/complete-guide-for-using-bitcoi...
...until they convert it to cash?
You get $10 worth of bitcoin in your account and it's confirmed, you have $10 of bitcoin, and nobody can take it back.
That, plus the lack of a 3% fee (although there might be one for their bitcoin processor) means a good amount of savings for some.
Legacy Bitcoin fees can be higher than their actual monthly plans.
The whole talk about "freedom and privacy" in relation to Bitcoin made me a bit nauseous. These are tech guys. It destroys trust for them to be blabbering nonsense about privacy like this.
They are going to charge you whatever amount of bitcoin gives them X CHF per month. If bitcoin doubles in value relative to CHF, then next month you'll probably be asked to pay half as much bitcoin.
This is no different than if you were buying service from a foreign company, and that company charged you in their local currency. You would have to pay the current equivalent in your local currency. Sometimes you would pay more than last month, sometimes less.
yeah it goes counter to all of the anti-deflationary schools of economics, but when have economists ever gotten actual human behavior right?
Bitcoin equals gold, nobody uses Bitcoin to consume anything. I don't know which human behavior you refer to.
The current price of Bitcoin is the market's best prediction of the present value of holding a bitcoin. When you spend $20 worth of bitcoin, you lose an expected $20 worth of utility from holding bitcoin (and, presumably, gain at least $20 of expected subjective utility from whatever you're buying). The past price of Bitcoin has no bearing on a rational actor's willingness to use it as a medium of exchange.
1) Because I need to buy things with dollars to a) not starve, freeze, etc. b) not get thrown in jail for tax evasion
and
2) because I'm not comfortable with that level of investment risk, and prefer a more diversified approach of mutual funds, bonds, and real estate.
We need to move beyond the obsession with anonymity and refocus the goal as being privacy. Then, recognize that privacy has several levels. That way, the expectation is more clear.
ProtonMail should support Monero. For now, I pay using a group of Monero wallets I churn every few hours and xmr.to. I suppose Bitcoin is the least common denominator in that sense.
You mean "we" == a dozen of first world countries? There is strong demand for anonymity all over the world.
Use Monero, not ZCash, not DASH with a special type of transaction, use MONERO with genuine ring confidential transactions.
RingCT - https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0005.pdf
Monero vs ZCash vs Mixers - https://moneroforcash.com/monero-vs-dash-vs-zcash-vs-bitcoin...
Every time I get a bitcoin invoice, I shapeshift some Monero
I don't get why anyone would ever want a snapshot of their finances ever.
ProtonMail is hiring!
Telling a customer who's been waiting on a feature for over a year to relax is just insulting.
I picked Fastmail due to their excellent support reputation, you all could learn from them!
While performance was going down, I noticed new features being announced. However, one key feature (exporting emails in bulk) was never done. I can assure you that is not rocket science, or rather is not a technical challenge that the brilliant minds who started PM could not overcome.
As for careers, I even made an effort to contact them. Whether I was up to par or not, I suspect my resume and two decades of experience were worthy of a reply, particularly given the quality of bug reporting I had provided during my use.
So honestly, the takeaway feeling was that the company was not well run or organized, which ultimately brings long-term reliability into question. And long-term reliability is very important to anyone doing real work and real business.
Translation: please don't be a dumbass.
I got in after a few weeks.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/6fbzzb/dying_wi...
The disappointment you've felt here is the same I felt with Fastmail. So I decided to move to Posteo instead and save money.
Here is an extract from Fastmail TOS:
Fastmail can disclose your info/data if it thinks it's in the interest of the company: "The Service Provider will not monitor, edit, or disclose any personal information about you [...] unless required or allowed by law, or where the Service Provider has a good faith belief that such action is necessary to: [...] (2) protect and defend the rights or property of the Service Provider; [...] (4) act to protect the interests of its members or others [...]
2) Exactly! And despite not being comfortable with Bitcoin as an investment, you may very well prefer it over the short term as a payment mechanism.
Is there? From whom? Facebook is still growing rapidly and now claims more than 2B users. It seems that not even privacy is in high demand, much less anonymity.
That's correct. It is very anti-anonymous by its design; its security rests everyone verifying the transactions. The distinction you make is the same one I attempt to make by arguing against anonymity as a goal. Both Bitcoin and Tor are, in the mind of the public, construed as ways to be anonymous on the Internet. That is dangerous.
https://blockchain.info/tx/5e3f8e728e7a9c14231806de537ae6177...
https://blockchain.info/block/0000000000000000005d8e91c8b1b3...
So in a way, his test was completed (no I don’t want to use this service) before he was even able to test their product.
Just imagine you want to test the food of the newly opened restaurant downstairs. Before you actually get to test the meal, have been treated like shit. Sure, you could have stayed to try the food, but you have already decided that it is not worth it.
The counterargument / parallel reality in an inflationary world is: "Why would anyone accept any money if it's worth less tomorrow?!"
The only difference between the two paradigms is that in the later, the currency creators have the power and in the former, the currency owners have the power. It is no coincidence that the financial institution has chosen to be in control of inflation and extract the wealth first, via seignorage, of currency inflation.
I mean they sort of don't, in the case of rapid inflation. See e.g. Brazil decades ago, with payment delays abound all over.
But that's not what we're talking about for a healthy economy, with a relatively small steady inflation rate. Very different.
That's the claim, where's the evidence?
People are transacting, and its not all to exchanges.
- Fastmail can immediately cancel your account for any reason: "The Service Provider may terminate your access to any part or all of the Service and any related service(s) at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately, for any reason whatsoever, with or without providing any refund of any payments."
- Fastmail can disclose your info/data if it thinks it's in the interest of the company: "The Service Provider will not monitor, edit, or disclose any personal information about you [...] unless required or allowed by law, or where the Service Provider has a good faith belief that such action is necessary to: [...] (2) protect and defend the rights or property of the Service Provider; [...] (4) act to protect the interests of its members or others [...]
By comparison, mailbox.org TOS are much better.
Also mailbox.org offers GPG encryption, which Fastmail doesn't (AFAIK).
I'll probably have my current mail service run out and then switch to protonmail for personal mail and selfhosted mail for spamming notifications from my nextcloud instance.
Do people limit that somehow?
I wonder how can they provide this without either storing encryption keys on their servers or reencrypting (client-side!) all email during such events.
ProtonMail is end-to-end encrypted. (Can't verify it myself, though.)
Assuming they don't backdoor their client to find out your passphrase, or log emails as they receive them, you're fairly safe from having an employee browse through your emails.
And honestly, e-mail is not only about communication but also about archiving of data, and what good is an archive if you can't even get the data out of it when you need it? I've been a Protonmail premium subscriber and I would have loved to stay on their service, but the fact of not being able to get my e-mails out of there in case I needed them made it totally unsuitable as a business e-mail account.
Keep in mind that pretty much everything is more complex with encrypted email, and that includes import and export. It will be done as soon as we can manage.
I remember reading that they have committed to letting you download all you data from all their properties, and the list on that page is certainly long, but I can't tell if it's complete.
To do Monero properly you need to wait a while (at least hours, better days) while churning to other addresses, being sure to keep your ringsize and fees looking like everyone else's. Hopefully they will raise the ringsize minimum to 10 in the upcoming hardfork - that will go some way towards fixing the problem.
For now, I bet there will be cases of people happily bouncing to Monero via Shapeshift and getting busted.
Bitcoin let's you transact without having to interact in physical space to acquire or spend them.
Furthermore, even though PM keeps user emails in encrypted form, virtually all of those emails are unencrypted on one or more servers related to the recipients of those emails. So unfortunately, the encryption is less valuable than we would like.
My future freedom depends on me getting this right, so I am a bit sensitive on this topic. It took me a while to cut through the fluff and figure out how to churn enough to make it safe. Fortunately I also used multiple Bitcoin mixers on both sides and didn't originally get our Bitcoin investment in a way that's directly linked to any of our identities.
It is somewhat irresponsible of Monero's marketing to make such grandiose privacy claims at the moment. I say this as someone that loves Monero and thinks their team is fantastic, and I'd bet Monero will be the privacy currency winner if it isn't already.
Personally I can see someone obviously paying me in BTC. But I will only send out XMR. It's a one way street with me regarding BTC.
Time is going to tell wether we retain our freedom or not by betting on XMR.
This whole argument is stuck in 2012. Lean not on your own understanding and look at the technology thats out there.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixmaster_anonymous_remailer
As for the hostile mixers, I'm afraid I can't offer any solution other than to rely on reputation. That said, it is rather telling that bitmixer.io is closing [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14843373]. It may not be safe to run a mixer; the feds may come after you.