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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?

#81

Post by faizshah »

sp332 wrote: post #3

> You are now the 265th person to do this but you contributed 45% of all the WETH in the contract.

I feel like this should be the takeaway. Instead of blaming users there should be some system that allows patches, updates and new features to be published to these smart contracts. It just seems silly that any programmer would think it’s a good idea to publish some code you can’t patch and horrifying to let that code scale to this size without being able to correct any of your original assumptions.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#82

Post by masklinn »

StringyBob wrote: post #66

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’ recomme…

> 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.

That seemed obvious from the first time I read the expression "code is law".

If code is law, any bug (whether in the contract itself or in the way the contract is called) fucks you irredeemably and with no recourse. I would expect any dev to shit their pants at the idea, even more so upon realising that the code in question is a half-assed brain damaged cousin of javascript, of all thing.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#83

Post by microtonal »

dividuum wrote: post #24
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? :)

Bad example. IBAN ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Bank_Account_Num... ) for example has a two digit checksum that prevents this and similar simple typos.

Besides the checksum, in some countries (e.g. in many banks in The Netherlands), the given name is also checked against the name associated with the target account [1].

[1] https://www.betaalvereniging.nl/betaalproducten-en-diensten/...

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#84

Post by theshrike79 »

richardburton wrote: post #76
StringyBob wrote: post #66

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’ recomme…

Quoted post unavailable.

Wait, you're actually comparing crypto to a symphony? Is the orchestra a bunch of first graders who have never played an instrument? =)

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#86

Post by noduerme »

StringyBob wrote: post #66

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’ recomme…

- needed to remove this. sorry.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#87

Post by BatteryMountain »

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…

It truly is laughable. Ever heard of "Return to Sender" in case of invalid events/transactions?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#88

Post by ciupicri »

ggm wrote: post #4

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 consequence…

> At least with banknotes if you photograph the serial numbers you can try to reclaim the value

In what country?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#89

Post by raverbashing »

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…

And WETH is "Wrapped ETH" because of compatibility and protocol issues (ERC-20)

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#90

Post by Hermel »

pshc wrote: post #74
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…

Also, ERC-777 tokens were supposed to fix this egregious problem by having all transfers check with their destinations (through hooks). There are also various similar extensions to ERC-20 I believe. Unfortunately, practically no one uses 777 as far as I'm aware? Certainly the OG Wrapped ETH contract doesn't, and it can't be upgraded because it's immutable.

The additional transaction fees that using ERC-777 would cost in the Ethereum network are probably much higher than someone losing half a million every now and then. So economically, adopting ERC-777 would be a step backwards.
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