I encountered a scary bug in Proton Wallet, posting here in case someone has the same problem

I sent around 20 euros worth of bitcoins to a friend, to test the service. Everything went fine and was very easy and intuitive

Today I logged in and noticed my balance was short by about 220 euros; It indicated that the transaction also sent around 220 euros to a second bitcoin address, classified as “external recipient”. This is usually normal, the wallet sends “change” back to itself, but in this case it didn’t seem to go back to me and the “external recipient” totally threw me off.

I imported proton wallet with Sparrow Wallet, it showed the same, incorrect, balance. I increased the “gap” value from 20 to 300 and the balance now shows up OK in Sparrow Wallet. The issue happens because Proton Wallet doesn’t use the first available change address, it used a random one way further down the list. In my case the “change” income was the change address 20-300th (I had to scroll a lot to find it).

My balance still shows incorrectly in Proton Wallet and the transaction shows as -240 euros. I have reported this issue to Proton, hopefully no one else will be scared :P

I received my invite today as well (Portugal). Overall here are my first impressions:

• Interface is very clean, but lacks a Dark mode
• You can import wallets by seed phrase only
• Buying bitcoins redirects you to a broker’s website, it’s not as seemless as I’d like. They ask you for all sorts of personal information, which I guess is industry standard, but it’s a third party service
• I tried making a 50 euro purchase, but after a few hours I got an email saying it was canceled, no reason provided
• You can’t sign messages to confirm the ownership of your wallet, which is required by some brokers
• This service is marketed as exclusive to users in the Visionary plan. I’m in the Proton Unlimited plan. It’s unclear what’s going to happen to my wallet once this beta period is over. Am I going to lose access to my bitcoins? Some functionality? The Proton support just told me “Please be advised that Proton Wallet is only available for users on our Visionary plan at the moment”, which doesn’t fully clarify it.

Very nice. Too bad they aren’t officially supporting arch, not sure if I want such a critical app installed via AUR (when someone builds it).

Be sure to review the packaging script very carefully, folks!

I know about this but it sucks for several reasons:

• This doesn’t use the proton vpn client

• You need to setup configuration files for each country you wish to connect

• You configure a server directly, you can’t just connect to “France” and have the client choose the server with the least load

• You can no longer select a random country, you have to introduce the randomness yourself

• You have to manage configurations like kill switches on your own, since you’re no longer using the proton client

It’s certainly a viable option, but why must linux users have all these drawbacks? :|

Proton supports Wireguard on Windows for several years now.

That Boss guy says it there, Linux customership is negligible.

Yeah, of course. I understand this. Developing for Linux is hard and probably not worth it financially.

It’s also a chicken/egg problem, isn’t it? If a Linux user is seeking a VPN software, why would they pick Proton over something with a better client? (eg: Mullvad). You can’t get a good user base when your product is so inferior.

The Proton Drive problem is something I don’t really understand. How hard would it be to develop a v1 product with rclone and then a v2 product that was actually nice?

Proton does improve their products, that’s true. I’m very happy with the improvements they have been making with Proton Pass, for instance.

But they don’t improve their linux products, at least not at a reasonable pace. How many years to we need to wait for WireGuard support? Or ipv6? :/

The problem isn’t just the packaging format, it’s the quality of the application. It’s missing a ton of functionalities that exist in the windows version. Wireguard isn’t available, for instance. And have you seen the design? Why do other OS get a beautiful application and we have that?

While I wish Linux support was something they prioritized, it doesn’t take much to understand it’s never gonna happen.

It takes a single look into the Proton VPN v4 client to understand Linux is a third class citizen at best.

It does affect Linux, tho! In fact that’s the only platform where proton claims to have no solution yet.

They have posted on Reddit that if you have kill switch and wireguard you are safe on every platform except Linux. A fix is being worked on for linux, no ETA.

I’m currently on Proton unlimited because I use all the Proton services but I had a wonderful experience with Mullvad VPN. Can’t recommend it enough.