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Yes, crypto is full of scams. But lumping Bitcoin in with them is like dismissing the internet because spam exists. As far as I know, Proton only supports Bitcoin payments. While many cryptocurrencies have been built on Ponzi schemes, if you study Bitcoin for less than 30 minutes, looking into how it came about, you can quickly understand that Satoshi Nakamoto didn't design it as a scam. This crypto is radically different from the rest of the market for several reasons: no CEO, no foundation, no plutocratic voting system like Proof of Stake and no previous success story of such system. It's not perfect, and it's not a totally revolutionary technology, but it's a strong, efficient, and resilient tool that has the potential to let people take control of their money and, at least partially, opt out of the petrodollar $ystem backed by war, weapons, and oil. It might never free people, just like the internet failed to. But these are still fairly recent technologies in humanity's story.

That's why Proton supporting Bitcoin makes perfect sense. They're a company dedicated to privacy and freedom. Bitcoin is the only widely-adopted cryptocurrency that actually aligns with those values. Proton is committed to serving people in oppressed regimes, offering them tools to protect themselves and their communities. Bitcoin, used carefully, is one of those tools. You probably don't realize this because you likely live somewhere where the banking system works well enough that you've never experienced being unbanked or persecuted by governments, unlike WikiLeaks and Sci-Hub, which rely on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to take some radical extreme example. It makes sense for Proton to offer payment through a pseudonymous, permissionless system native to cyberspace in this regard.

It's also worth remembering that if 100% of a bank's clients asked to withdraw their funds at once, the system would collapse and banks would lock withdrawals before that happens. Fractional reserve banking only works if people don't realize it's a system built on collective faith. So call crypto a Ponzi if you want, but at least take time to learn how banking actually works, how state currency is created, what it used to be, and that money predates the concept of nations. To me, paper money is the more dangerous Ponzi scheme, one that's caused tremendous harm by funding wars and financing a destructive economy built on fossil fuels and obscene wealth inequality.

Bitcoin has its flaws. But it's honest about what it is. Money backed by math, energy and consensus rather than force from the elit. That's worth exploring, especially when you consider what the alternative has actually done to the world.

Good resources to learn more about it: -Every book or conference made by Andreas Antonopoulos

• arte documentary: Satoshi's mystery
• The Book of Satoshi from Phil Champagne
• Human Rights Foundation reports and the video "check your financial privileges"
• learnmeabitcoin website

I work with people in Goma (Republic Democratic of Congo 🇨🇩). It's not a peaceful place there and banks have shown their limits, they are pretty much all closed in this region. While they still use cash, people there are pretty happy that USDT and BTC exists. I'm not talking about a few elitist group of rich congolese but the average citizen, men, women and even kids. Your banking comfort is not the reality for everyone in this world. Proton isn't just an expensive suite of services for the rich that demand privacy and Bitcoin/Crypto are not just gambling assets for rich kids and scammers. Reality is often more nuanced.

for all of crypto's flaws and for all it's abuse in scams, the recent payment processor overreach does show that they were right about one thing: decentralizing finance is a vital step in being able to circumvent bad actors from enforcing their personal morality under threat of de-banking entire industries. It has to be implemented well and it has to be regulated, but decentralization of essential services is the way forward. Shame the concept got smeared with the horrid reputation of crypto as a tool for scammers and grifters

LOL at the replies. Definitely not a cult.

US (Petro)Dollar and state money also are cults, you're just part of it.

I hope you won't experience debankarization or hyper-inflation during your life

https://xcancel.com/runasand/status/831266832678010880

That doesn't mean anything with that post without much further inspection. Even if you don't know what VPNs are actually are this page can explain about it: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29

Oh my GOD, you’re so right!!!!!

Wrong. Very wrong. VPNs strongly encrypt traffic e2e to servers, where thousands of other connections arrive, then leave to final destination. So no one knows who's who.

Ok LR88. Maybe you're new to the VPN thing that VPNs can still see who you are regardless whether you trust with the marketing and you pay their service as not you're no anonymous by any means given you're putting trust to a company that have a high chance to give personal info to your government which already happens to a ton of VPNs if you don't understand the scandals. If you want to actually get a VPN make one yourself at home but if you want but if you want to pay try to do a lot of search as use it as a way to swap IPs to the country you want but it doesn't help with privacy but if you want to save money by any means make your own VPN is more secure

While this can be true it usually is the case with free VPNs. VPN was not built for privacy but for security, accessing network from the outside using encryption and tunneling. You can have privacy benefits by using some VPN but this is rather a trust switch from your ISP to your VPN company. That's why it matter to choose a reliable service and ProtonVPN, while not being perfect, is a good privacy service for most people.

The reason of the comparation of a proxy and a VPN is due of both doing the same work with different types of scope: Proxy are more specialized on software while VPNs are on a OS which but both have their uses like Proxies being more to speed and VPNs to privacy which I put it in quotations given it's a heavily debated topic that people want a good VPN but they're more likely to go for a proxy as VPNs don't have much function for most people even with Piracy, Multiplayer, Price Regional, Stop Throttling Wifi but that's all the practical uses for Proxies. VPNs are very easy to market due of their lack of notoriety and puffery tactics like no logs policy where proxies are less prevalent given they aren't as heavily marketed compared to VPNs.