Empty destination field in transfer history

Question

I have one transaction where i don't see the destination address. All of other my transactions have it.

I use Monero in command line on my Linux.

When i type command "show_transfer " of this transaction i see:

• [wallet 5ByqT1]: show_transfer 159scf6446d*****************************************************
• Outgoing transaction found
• txid: <159scf6446d*****************************************************>
• Height: 14*****
• Timestamp: 2017-****
• Amount: ***
• Payment ID: 0000000000000000
• Change: ***
• Fee: ***
• Destinations:
• Note:

(I use bullet list because of strange stackexchange text formatting)

Field "Destinations:" is empty.

Why does it happens?

Thank you for help.

Answer 1

What is happening is that you made that transfer from a different wallet file. A wallet cache cannot be fully restored once it's gone.

Perhaps your address was originally a MyMonero wallet, and you restored it in the CLI, after sending a transaction from the wallet when it was still a MyMonero wallet.

Or maybe you created this wallet on Linux originally... and you sent some Monero... and then you were goofing around with installing more things on Linux, and your experimentation back-fired... and you ended having to install a fresh Linux system, and you then restored your Monero wallet, and it's been working well ever since.

In both cases, the wallet currently being used was unable to completely restore the cache to include the public addresses for prior (original wallet) outgoing transfers. This is a consequence of stealth addresses. There is simply no [reasonable] way to figure out which public address was used to create the one-time stealth address.

For technical details on the matter - the reason the math can't just be run backward to figure out the public address from the stealth address - check out Elliptic Curve Cryptography and the Discrete Log Problem.