Proton isn’t reinventing the wheel with this crypto wallet. But it’s another solid option for people looking to create a crypto wallet for the first time. However, cryptocurrencies tend to be a polarizing topic, so let’s see if Proton Wallet doesn’t hurt Proton’s brand image in the future.
- More information: Proton Blog Article
How will it hurt them? If you don’t want a Bitcoin wallet, don’t use it. It’s not like offering one takes a significant amount of resources or drives up the cost.
As a userbase grows, companies have 2 options to make it more competitive.
More services Lower prices
And no company chooses the later.
And that’s how you get bloat
Companies do the second all the time. As the number of services grows, so do the options for service tiers. But that only works if there’s competition. For example, my ISP had two options for years, but as soon as my city announced a new fiber rollout, they overhauled their product offering with options above and below the previous options. I just checked and they overhauled things again (new higher tiers), and now my tier is $5/month cheaper than it used to be. In my area, we currently have about 4 options (cable, DSL, my local ISP, radio), and we’re adding a city-owned fiber network as a fifth.
Oh, and they added more features and now offer TV, managed WiFi, etc, and those are also at competitive prices. So at least in my case, adding options has decreased prices due to product segmentation.
Back when I only had 2 options (cable or DSL), their prices kept going up and their features stayed stagnant.
I’m not a customer, but I personally avoid any company offering that mentions crypto and/or AI. I’m guessing I’m not alone based on some responses here. They are just the latest buzz words to try to inflate company value and I’m tired of them.
I started migrating off from Google products (homepage, chrome, drive soon) and my laptop does not have windows anymore for example. It’s hard to get customer trust back after it is lost.