Given that they just hold BTC all these years means they have income from other forms of payments. I do not use their service, but I notice that they have PayPal and BTC as ways to make donations, so these are probably the ways how users can pay for premium accounts.

I check their address (donation button) and it show Total Received 216.25926871 BTC - https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1Q1nhq1NbxPYAbw1BppwKbCqg58ZqMb9A8?page=1

It is possible that this is just a donation address and the amount they own is actually much higher.

Protonmail is great, I've been using it for a while now and can not say anything bad about it. Can't wait for them to finally release their calendar service soon!

It is interesting that they aren't selling their BTC. They must have enough income from other payments to pay their expenses. Maybe they just don't get that much BTC payments? It is a rather risky business move though. Oh well, it seems to have paid off 

I'm curious if they are planning on accepting other cryptos in the future..

Protonmail and bitcoin, both have created for one major feature - Privacy!

One of Protonmail's USP is Anonymous Email service. Bitcoin's one of the major pillars of strength is anonymity. It's no wonder that they have been accepting bitcoin as a method of payment. However, I doubt that they are accepting it since 2014. See the below link,

https://protonmail.com/blog/bitcoin-secure-email/

It's Protonmail's own blog where they have announced that bitcoin is officially added as one of their payment methods. See the date of posting the article, it show as August 2017. Now if they are saying 2014, they are contradicting their own announcement. But yes, more such service will definitely help bitcoin to become the official currency of Internet as envisaged by Satoshi himself!

Definitely a risky move if they actually did this.  The only other business I know of that actually accepts bitcoin (as opposed to using a payment processor which converts crypto to fiat) is overstock.com, and I think I remember reading that the CEO had said they had kept a lot of the crypto that they received as payment--and given how volatile bitcoin is, that's a crazy thing to do.

Wow, that's a lot of donations--but if all of that came from 2014-present, it doesn't sound so outrageous.  It's still a hell of a lot of money, and I guess in hindsight they were smart to hold onto the bitcoin they received, but things could easily have gone the other way.

Anyway, I've heard of protonmail but I don't know much about it.  I think I may have to check them out if they're privacy-friendly.

I believe so, most of their users must be using fiat forms of payment in order to pay for their services, which is weird, because a service providing secure emails and privacy, you would expect them to use crypto-currencies mostly, but I guess some people like the convenience.

They probably have a target in mind - everyone does, but if they aren't desperate for income and make enough, it's fine.

I think they've been accepting BTC donations since the very start, but have only recently added it as an actual payment method. This, or they could have just bought some BTC previously.

I wonder as well, with this tweet of them https://twitter.com/ProtonMail/status/1196049729655918593 so it's somewhere on there cold wallets.


This is not necessary if they're into hodling, I'm sure their team knows what they're doing and waiting the right time to sell it, well, not for now.

This is correct. You can see their blog posts from back in 2014 when their Indiegogo fundraiser was still ongoing thanking people for bitcoin donations here: https://protonmail.com/blog/indiegogo/.

Whose to say that's true? I'm sure a company filled with people who are interested in security and privacy, and who have been exposed to bitcoin since at least 2014, would have at least a few employees who would be interested in accepting their salary (or part thereof) in bitcoin. They've also been pretty clear that they used bitcoin to fund a lot of their costs after Paypal cut off their main source of funding (see the tweet linked to by bl4nkcode).

Yeah I also saw that tweet a couple of days ago.

And I was surprised that they're a HOLDer, Lol, obviously the people behind ProtonMail knows that time that BTC will be huge. No wonder that their product is also very successful as I have been using them since 2016.

It isn't clear which data they provide.
As it was end to end encryption, they couldn't be able to provide anything. Something is wrong here... They didn't clearly specified which data they give to authorities