This is a beautiful performance. Thanks for sharing.

$50 per transaction fee is on the exceptionally high end.

The average fee for the last 24 hours was $0.81 per transaction according to https://mempool.space/mining

I agree with your other points.

One of my favorite charities, GiveDirectly, researched the effects of large cash transfers on inflation in Kenya.

Vox has a good write-up: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/11/25/20973151/givedirectly-basic-income-kenya-study-stimulus

GiveDirectly gave about $1,000 (or $1,871 in purchasing power terms) each to more than 10,500 households, through three transfers over the course of about eight months. The program amounted to about 15 percent of the GDP of the local area. For comparison, that’s about three times as much economic stimulus, relative to the size of the economy, as the 2008-09 stimulus packages in the US.

They found that the cash transfers not only benefited recipients; they benefited people in nearby villages too because recipients spent more money, some of which went to their neighbors’ businesses. Contrary to some fears, there were no meaningful inflation effects, and there were no envy or jealousy effects where people close by who didn’t receive cash felt worse off after the intervention.

Here’s a direct link to the published study, updated Nov. 2022: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.3982/ECTA17945

If you’re curious, they have info. about many of their research projects (a number of which are published and peer reviewed) at https://www.givedirectly.org/research-at-give-directly/

I think we mostly agree, and I appreciate you advocating for secure alternatives and privacy in general!

How can proton protect your unencrypted emails? Unless you are writing someone that also uses protonmail or pgp, the emails wont be encrypted.

That’s true. Proton can only encrypt your inbox in that case.

This is barely an advantage at all over the existing system.

I disagree. Having my inbox encrypted and using an email provider that doesn’t mine my data is certainly worthwhile for me.

You are just telling people to depend on this single point of failure, which is proton. You cant expect everyone to use protonmail, that would be unwise from a decentralization standpoint.

I’m not advocating Proton over other, more secure and private communication methods. My point is that, if you’re choosing an email provider, Proton is a good choice. They’re a nonprofit whose mission is privacy, and they spend considerable technical effort to ensure it.

I would hate to see someone switch from Proton to Gmail or some other provider that doesn’t offer any privacy because they mistakenly think all providers are the same.

The real solution is only using email for people that are unwilling or unable to use something other than email. For everyone else you should simply switch to different communications protocols that were made with e2ee in mind.

To the extent that’s practical, I strongly agree. As you correctly point out, email is a plaintext protocol, and there’s nothing Proton can do about that.

But if you do use email and not all your contacts have exchanged PGP keys with you, which I’m sure is true for many people, then I think there’s a lot of value in using a provider that offers an encrypted inbox and doesn’t mine your data.

The problem is that almost no one uses PGP, as this vice article points out: https://www.vice.com/en/article/vvbw9a/even-the-inventor-of-pgp-doesnt-use-pgp

If your goal is secure communication with other tech-savvy, privacy conscious people, then I agree that PGP is a reliable, time tested solution.

But if your goal is to keep email providers from data mining your inbox, then Proton is an easy way to do that, no matter who you’re communicating with.

Here’s the writeup from GiveDirectly itself: https://www.givedirectly.org/2023-ubi-results/

You can also donate to them. They provide direct cash transfers to the worlds’s poorest communities, as well as ongoing research into the effects of things like UBI.

These are great recommendations, thank you! I’m especially looking forward to the Valeria Montaldi stories.

I read The Once and Future King a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. (It’s probably as close as I’ll ever get to Le Morte d’Arthur haha)