Did I just lose half a million dollars? • Hacker News Board

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#61

Post by aemreunal » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:30 AM UTC

ddtaylor wrote: post #58

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?

So crypto is immutable, "code is law", decentralized, whatever, until people need to roll back transactions and use centralized exchanges because "they already solved these issues"? Seems like a whole lot of global warming just to re-invent a terrible imitation of banking...

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#62

Post by hestefisk » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:31 AM UTC

tommek4077 wrote: post #21

rosndo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Centralized systems work like a web of tunnels - you can’t send “nowhere” or make a huge mistake You can totally make a 1 digit typo while making a bank transfer that results in all the money being lost. Perhaps you’ll recover it after years of litigation, but that’s really not guaranteed. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/dec/07/i-lost-my-1930... E: downvoted by upset bankers? :)

Americans do not understand money transfer, they are still using cheques and western union. To everyone: If you wrongly send money to a mistyped IBAN it is gone.

There’s SWIFT, and they have a reasonably good dispute mechanism, at least for cross border payments.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#63

Post by jstx1 » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:32 AM UTC

ddtaylor wrote: post #58

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?

It's a relatively small amount and I don't think that the original poster is connected enough. It's immutable for them.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#64

Post by nly » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:33 AM UTC

ab_testing wrote: post #7

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

Even in todays traditional banking system there are a litany of cases where people refuse to take responsibility for their gullible actions and expect their bank to bail them out.

There are a few stories on the ThisIsMoney (UK's Daily Mail's money rag) front page right now about relatively convincing and sophisticated scams where people were robbed of thousands.

The average person isn't ready for the risk of crypto.

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/beatthescammers/article-...

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#65

Post by verytrivial » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:34 AM UTC

hughrr wrote: post #26

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…

The problem with crypto is despite your explanation, I have no idea what any of your post means. Not any of it.

This is apparently a feature, not a bug.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#66

Post by StringyBob » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:35 AM UTC

Having watched cryptocurrency from a distance via HN etc. for over a decade, I thought I had a general understanding, but this made me realize I wasn’t aware of what smart contracts really were (just looked up solidity today and details of The DAO hack). The potential for irreversible losses, fraud and security holes are much bigger than I realized.

This also lead me to this video which will now be my ‘go to’ recommendation for anyone asking about crypto and NFTs - it’s a general critique and social commentary of the issues with crypto - not specifically about this case, but I thought excellent, and the first time I think I’ve watched a 2hr vid on YouTube ‘Line goes up’ - https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#67

Post by noduerme » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:36 AM UTC

afidrya wrote: post #60

noduerme wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 smal…

I've written middleware APIs for accepting currency in carts and casinos that interfaced with / polled bitcoind and other daemons. Why on earth would this person be calling APIs directly, and why would the daemon not just reject the transaction if it's an unexpected kind of token? Or if he added funds to the contract why not be able to remove them to the same address? I never dealt with smart contracts but even allowing this to happen without an error seems like a crazy, terrible design.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#68

Post by repomies69 » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:37 AM UTC

ddtaylor wrote: post #58

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?

It is immutable, unless in some cases it is not. However of majority of us plebs it is practically immutable.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#69

Post by fsh » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:38 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 still don't get WETH. What is the purpose of exchanging ETH, which is a token on the Ethereum blockchain, for WETH, which is also a token on the Ethereum blockchain (with the same nominal value)?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#70

Post by nikanj » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:38 AM UTC

YATA0 wrote: post #54

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.

The price of eth is surprisingly easy to calculate, with the coin price being (new dollars people are willing to invest into crypto)/(amount of coins in circulation).

There are no pesky externalities like "amount of EBITDA per outstanding eth", every single dollar is coming from someone buying in.

This reduced the denominator, thus increasing the value of eth.