Did I just lose half a million dollars?

It's not money until it's in a federally recognised financial institution. If it's bearer bonds, or bits, you can burn it. At least with banknotes if you photograph the serial numbers you can try to reclaim the value, but with bits.. it's complicated.

Of course in principle you can reverse this. Nobody is going to want to do the codework to recreate this wealth, it would cost a lot more than $500k and has consequences. I'm told some models include a way to un"oops" the signature chain but they beg so many questions.

OK. Let's be honest, the entire model begs many questions. I am sure people here will use this to both back, and belabour Etherium and contracts (as I have done, I'm not unaware how partisan I am on this)

Mark Latham, the former leader of the Labor party of Australia (he is an utterly repellent man otherwise in my view, but I admire a good writer) has a fine way with words, and referred to his opponents as "a conga line of suck holes" [0]. I've always felt this is applicable to the chain.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Latham#Labor_member_of_...

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#5

Post by ssiddharth » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 7:33 AM UTC

In case you’re wondering what happened, from the thread:

He sent ETH to the WETH contract, received WETH as expected.

Then he wanted to do the reverse and sent WETH, but will not receive anything, because you're supposed to swap your WETH to ETH in exchanges like Uniswap, or call the "withdraw" function in the contract.

For contracts that want to only work with ERC-20 tokens, you use WETH, which comes from a contract that takes 1 eth and gives you 1 WETH.

A known problem with ERC-20 tokens is that transferring them to a contract that isn't made to access them is equivalent to burning them. You should almost never transfer ERC-20 to a smart contract. You instead use approve to give the smart contract permission to withdraw, then call the function you want to receive and tell it to make the withdraw (the contract will internally call transferFrom).

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#6

Post by jcun4128 » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 7:37 AM UTC

I did something similar on a thankfully tiny scale. Was screwing around with different cheap coins and did something like sending Reddcoin to Litecoin and yeah I just lost it. But it was pennies.

For more context I was messing around with Shapeshift back in 2018 which you generate a deposit and withdraw address for some crypto currency pair eg. LTC to Doge. I messed up this process.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#7

Post by ab_testing » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 7:38 AM UTC

ssiddharth wrote: post #5

In case you’re wondering what happened, from the thread: He sent ETH to the WETH contract, received WETH as expected. Then he wanted to do the reverse and sent WETH, but will not receive anything, because you're supposed to swap your WETH to ETH in exchanges like Uniswap, or call the "withdraw" function in the contract. For contracts that want to only work with ERC-20 tokens, you use WETH, which comes from a contract…

I think this is a problem with crypto that will forever prevent it from becoming mainstream. The average person understands the concept of money but understanding smart contracts is out of scope for a large part of the general population m

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#8

Post by ddoice » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 7:47 AM UTC

I lost 4.5K transfering USDT from Binance to Coinbase From time to time I check if the money is still there.

The last time I asked Coinbase support they didn't even bother to answer me.

I was not investing, one of my contractors unilaterally decided to pay me in crypto.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#9

Post by wruza » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 7:50 AM UTC

Is this a motivation issue with crypto? Here is what I mean. Centralized systems work like a web of tunnels - you can’t send “nowhere” or make a huge mistake, but if your part of a tunnel gets shut for some reason, you’re locked. Decentralized ones are like an endless empty void with point-like islands of ownership in it. You can send anywhere, but make one mistake and it’s over. Now pepper this with our usual issues with code correctness and debugging.

The issue is that people do like tunnels because they feel safe, and empty voids are scary. This incentives to still build and use tunnels around this void, which makes “crypto”-ness just an implementation detail not worth using as is by the masses.

Afaiu, this happens for two reasons: 1, the usual, people tend to forget assertions. 2, the new one, crypto institutions who make contracts are incentivized to omit assertions because runtime now costs serious money. They are like factories where there is no rule of safety yet.

Is the above correct, or is it a true half a million dollars mistake? You can’t trust node_modules as it seems, how can you trust piles of contracts code when there is no support, no takedowns of bad versions and no easily accessible (and decentralized?) audit?

Also, could a type system help in this case?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#10

Post by londons_explore » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 7:53 AM UTC

This is really a problem to be solved by etherium clients.

Instead of just saying "what address should we send this to?", they should have code which allows a "preview" of what will happen after the transfer.

After all, all the logic is there on the Blockchain, so the client can easily pop up a warning saying "what you are trying to send will be permanently unspendable. You can't so this without the --i-want-to-destroy-my-coins flag".

The preview logic could recognise various common smart contracts to give the user a better idea what the spending conditions for each are too.