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Did I just lose half a million dollars?

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Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#51

Post by Scarblac »

tetha wrote: post #22
ab_testing wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hm, but wouldn't smart contracts have to be as complex as a non-smart contract, if a smart contract were to replace the dumb contract? If I'm looking at the regular B2B contracts I'm supporting at work, even normal contracts are already testing people. Piling (highly complicated, mind you) software on top of that problem seems nuts and entirely not feasible.

Non-smart contracts also have something like the two sides having an understanding of what the spirit of what they agreed was, and they can be discussed in court and interpreted by a judge when all else fails. So not absolutely everything has to be spelled out all the time.

Smart contracts are code and there is no fallback mechanism in case of mistakes.

They probably have to be way more complicated than non-smart contracts?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#52

Post by Gigachad »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #45
ab_testing wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think it is more a fundamental philosophical problem with Ethereum. They have fascinating ideas and workarounds for all sorts of issues, but in the end they keep layering complex solutions on more complex solutions. Maybe a bit like enterprise software, just add another abstraction layer...

The problem is that irreversible transactions are just bad. There is no way around it. Crypto is broken at the most fundamental level.

This kind of fuckup could not happen with regular banking and if you somehow did mess up you can almost always have your money recovered. There is no way to just black hole it never to be seen again.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#53

Post by Gigachad »

brazzy wrote: post #29
tommek4077 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you can do crazy stuff, doesn't mean you have to do it. Like the normal guy isn't trading interst rate derivates or stuff like that. Also at least with european banking, if you wringly send money to another account, it is also gone forever. A lot of scams regarding old people build up on this. We do not need to buy google play store vouchers like the americans tonget scammed.

>Also at least with european banking, if you wringly send money to another account, it is also gone forever. Not true. The money is still legally yours if you can prove that it's a mistake or you were deceived, and can be recovered via the legal system if the recipient does not refund it voluntarily. Scammers just move the money away via other, less traceable channels before that can happen.

And if you send it to the wrong person who isn’t a scammer. They aren’t going to quickly move the funds and shut their account down.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#54

Post by YATA0 »

Crypto Darwinism is a real thing. Insane to see that amount of money just disappear. Literally just poof, it's gone. Not "gone" like someone stole it, because that money didn't disappear, the thief has it now. This money literally went into a digital blackhole.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#55

Post by noduerme »

westcoast330 wrote: post #38

The future of currency ladies and gentlemen. This money is literally gone. Unrecoverable. Like he took the money out to a barrel and burned it. Only he didn't get any warmth out of it in exchange.

At least the rest of the planet got a little warmer /s

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#56

Post by noduerme »

yoavm wrote: post #47
westcoast330 wrote: post #38

The future of currency ladies and gentlemen. This money is literally gone. Unrecoverable. Like he took the money out to a barrel and burned it. Only he didn't get any warmth out of it in exchange.

Considering the emissions of all proof-of-work-based Blockchains, he probably warmed all of us.

ah. Such an easy setup, it was a sure thing I'd be second to the party.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#57

Post by mrweasel »

brazzy wrote: post #29
tommek4077 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you can do crazy stuff, doesn't mean you have to do it. Like the normal guy isn't trading interst rate derivates or stuff like that. Also at least with european banking, if you wringly send money to another account, it is also gone forever. A lot of scams regarding old people build up on this. We do not need to buy google play store vouchers like the americans tonget scammed.

>Also at least with european banking, if you wringly send money to another account, it is also gone forever. Not true. The money is still legally yours if you can prove that it's a mistake or you were deceived, and can be recovered via the legal system if the recipient does not refund it voluntarily. Scammers just move the money away via other, less traceable channels before that can happen.

If caught quickly enough, like within a day, and the money is still in the receiving account, it is very easy to get your money back.

As you say, scammers move money quickly, and they do so to avoid the money being refunded.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#58

Post by ddtaylor »

I love how everyone assumes that the ETH blockchain is immutable and there is nothing that can happen to undo any of this. Did everyone simply forget when the Dao had a contract bug and the ETH devs literally just rolled back the transaction?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#60

Post by afidrya »

noduerme wrote: post #41
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…

Wait. I'm not letting anyone off the hook for not knowing the above if they put $5 into something, let alone $500k. But even as a coder and someone who was deeply involved in crypto at one point (2011) I find it hard to make heads or tails of wtf this means. All I hear are a lot of acronyms and bizarre edge cases upon edge cases. It sounds like those arguments you'd hear between kids in junior high over magic cards o…

In simple words, he should have called a smart contract's function which would withdraw his tokens and send real ETH to his address. Instead, he sent tokens to smart contract's address and they will stay there forever, not associated with any account. This complexity should be abstracted away by wallet's UI. Users don't have to call APIs directly. Also, this whole situation could be prevented by trying to send a smaller amount first.
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