• Announcements

  • Second donation to GrapheneOS by the Proton Foundation

kllsajfkasjf I am more inclined to agree that Proton products need to borrow the reputation of GrapheneOS.

I don't think that giving 5,000 $ every three years borrows the reputation of GrapheneOS. I think it is part of their marketing strategy to fund privacy software, and GrapheneOS is just one of the most obvious candidates. I'm just glad they do so !

      Eirikr70
      " we give to GrapheneOS " that's all Proton or the press have to say, not the amounts or regularity; and the Good aura from GrapheneOS and others rubs off on Proton, I am out and out cynical of donations like this, taken together with other amounts and its a tax burden write off or similar an accountants paper exercise, only big enough to be noticed and small enough to disrupt and damage regular cash flow to GrapheneOS. Regular payments are the life line of projects like GrapheneOS, dumps of cash make regular contributor's think, maybe not this month, they have enough $5000 is enough isn't it? Then one month not donating becomes two etc... You might say damned if they donate, damned if they dont. I personally, do not trust Proton.

          area51 I didn't expect to see someone use a $5,000 donation from a pro-privacy non-profit as a reason to distrust Proton in this thread. That's quite a bold stance.

            Andy Yen the CEO of proton answered about Monero payment support in the future 6 days ago on Reddit :

            https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1jbdeyz/will_you_ever_accept_monero/

            • To be honest, probably not directly, there are Swiss statutory audit issues with this. However, we are exploring ways of making this possible via third party intermediaries.

            Larger companies in Switzerland must be audited by law, and Big 4 auditing firms are wary of crypto. You can get some of them to sign on as auditors if you have Bitcoin, but let's just say certain cryptos pose an issue. This requirement only kicks in past a certain scale. For a smaller business, you can more or less do whatever you want.

              grayway2

              Yes the so called privacy coins like Monero are an issue for the KYC rules.
              For the meantime there is kycnot.me which I heard from

                Distrust or doubts towards Proton are a recurrent theme on this forum, but I don’t see the point of uttering them again in a unconvincing manner in this very thread, under an official thanking message.

                But since it has become the subject…

                Proton mainstreamness comes with a price; don’t expect anything radical from Proton.
                I do trust Proton… up to a point, which is fine. Also, maybe some people would benefit from watching this recent video from Privacy Guides.

                grayway2

                Maybe it’s Proton’s mainstreamness, but I am not convinced they had to choose one of the Big Four. Perhaps, if they really wanted, they could have chosen another auditor, like BDO, but they’d probably lose some benefits, or they simply didn’t want to take the risk associated with a change of auditor.
                That being said, I cannot judge, and cannot say if it’s more strategy-driven or more prestige-driven.

                However, to relativise the issue between auditors and Monero, I’ll point out that a firm like BDO – part of the ‘Next Ten’ auditors, maybe even the fifth globally, so the first of the Next Ten – seems to accept clients trading with Monero, for instance Bity.
                Bity SA (bity.com) owns a network of no-KYC Monero ATMs in Switzerland, and has been audited by BDO.