Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source)

Posted Nov 7, 2025 16:14 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source) by paulj
Parent article: Debian to require Rust as of May 2026

OK, so how do we debug this? I sent the money, as far as I can tell, and you didn't receive it. My records show that I paid Binance to send 87774rpgLdmjCFLqyV3BYN6VwBzdvaVbccVUF2K3NHGEFyoQKxCTqcxeDcPHpQPixqitthXhYK5uGbYuFExff24ACiaAUkH a total of 0.012 Monero just before posting that comment; your records show that it never arrived.

From my end, this is undebuggable; I know how to handle it in normal cases, but not here.

With the conventional banking system (SWIFT, for example), I'd raise a complaint with my bank; they would then identify where they sent the money, and would either present to me proof that it had been received at the intended recipient, or refund me if they could not trace it to the destination I told them to send it to.

With the card system, I'd open a merchant dispute via my card company, and they'd give the merchant a chance to respond to the dispute (which identifies the transaction to the merchant as part of the dispute, so if it's just bad record keeping at their end, it gets fixed). If the merchant doesn't respond adequately, in the view of my card company, then I get a refund.

Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source)

Posted Nov 7, 2025 16:54 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

Your custodian should have the transaction ID and the transaction view key. You may be able to retrieve that. Though, if your custodian batched up outgoing payments, they probably won't give you the tx view key. You should still be able to talk to the support of your custodian and have them debug it. Just like SWIFT or whatever... (Though I think Binance have since delisted Monero, cause it's too good).

I suspect your custodian has a minimum withdrawal amount, and the .012 XMR was well below that and hence was never sent. Whether that resulted in the amount being taken from your balance with them, I don't know. In which case, for tiny payments you would need to use a proper wallet under your control (e.g., Monerujo is on F-Droid, perhaps Cake wallet is good too). That's a social issue wrt demand, at this point in time - not a technical one.

Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source)

Posted Nov 7, 2025 16:57 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

I'll ask Binance for those details; they did confirm that they sent 0.012 XMR, however, but didn't give me a transaction ID or a transaction view key at the time.

The reason for sending that much is that it put me just over their minimum withdrawal amount (I paid them £2.50 in total, including their fees, plus the cost of the Monero).

But again, this is a migration issue - I'm not plugged into the Monero ecosystem, and I have no idea how I'd get Monero other than via a company like Binance. Again, if your system depends on people plugging into Monero, how do you expect people to know this sort of detail?

And it's not like SWIFT, because with SWIFT, I identify the transaction to my bank, and they take responsibility for following through to confirm that it either arrived, or didn't. If it didn't arrive, they'll refund me - and I can try again. I'm not entirely sure what the equivalent is here.

Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source)

Posted Nov 10, 2025 12:00 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

You can get a monero wallet from, e.g., the Monero website, or from the f-droid store (e.g. monerujo). Create a wallet, reply with an address and I or someone else may well reimburse your previous costs. ;)

I don't think Binance list Monero anymore, cause Monero is too good at what it does. We're basically in the middle of a repeat of the US' war on cryptography in the 90s. Mostly led by the EU this time. Just like then, it will fail, cause you can not unlearn and ban math. The CryptoNote paper exists, it's a beautiful paper - probably one of the seminal works in distributed consensus along with the papers on Bitcoin, Paxos, Radia Perlman's Byzantine General Routing System paper/Ph.D., Lamport's clock, and such - and they can not make it go away. Just like in the 90s, they will lose. (I need to get a T-shirt printed with the key equations from CryptoNote, like the old RSA t-shirts from the first crypto war).

So yes, this technology is still early days, it is not well integrated into other things, and it won't be for a while for various social reasons around distributed payment technologies and the clash these cause with state desires for tight control. Distributed payment technologies will win out eventually though.

If you want an entity to deal with, who will handle everything and indemnify you, there will be such entities. The existence of a technology that allows anyone to participate does NOT prevent anyone setting up a business around it so you can have a more traditional interface to it.

Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source)

Posted Nov 10, 2025 12:10 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

I don't see how to set up a Monero wallet that accepts GBP; I sent you money using a payment from my credit card (which I paid off).

It sounds, though, like what you're saying is "this technology is too new and unreliable for people not yet willing to dive in fully", which in turn makes it completely unsuitable for sending money to pay for e-mail delivery. I have to commit to replacing my existing financial management (which I'm happy with) with a new technology I don't fully understand or trust, replace my existing private mail server (which I'm happy with) with a new one that I don't fully understand or trust, and do so for questionable benefits (since the assertions around what's going to work in the new system are at odds with the history of Prestel and of SMS).