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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?

#101

Post by neuronic »

aemreunal wrote: post #61
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...

> decentralized

After reading Moxie's blog post on web3 [1] I feel it is a stretch to call anything Ehtereum-based decentralized anymore when this many applications use Alchemy or Infura as providers for their Ethereum nodes.

[1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#102

Post by ciupicri »

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.

What do you mean by crypto Darwinism?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#104

Post by ggm »

ciupicri wrote: post #88
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?

In many countries: try Google for "recover destroyed banknote" search.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#105

Post by noduerme »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #87
afidrya wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah. Even in the original bitcoind API you would run a validation call on the address and the spend before actually committing it. Afaik you couldn't accidentally send coins into a black hole even if you tried.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#106

Post by pshc »

Hermel wrote: post #90
pshc wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree that deploying the full 777 would be too costly, yes, and probably open up reentrancy attacks.

But one simple check in the transfer function would have saved this person half a million. I would gladly pay that tiny extra bit of gas for their sake.

I wonder how the math shakes out over time.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#107

Post by RedShift1 »

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?

The only way to roll back transactions is to create a fork of the blockchain. A very politically loaded topic to say the least.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#108

Post by truetraveller »

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'm a senior developer with a massive breadth of knowledge. I read like crazy. I have no idea what you just said. I'm sure I could probably understand after a some research. The point is: this stuff is not for the average Joe!

It's like the famous quote by some dude: "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?"

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#109

Post by pshc »

gws wrote: post #73
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 don’t understand why these contracts don’t let addresses that make this particular error recover their funds, it would be easy to implement at contract creation or am I missing something?

That would be a good fix, and it is a glaring omission. But the contract can't be upgraded, so all existing contracts depending on wETH would have to be migrated or replaced too.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#110

Post by neuronic »

Gigachad wrote: post #59
sp332 wrote: post #3

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

265 people made a mistake which deleted their money. How is crypto still so broken at a fundamental level after over a decade of work.

The incentive of any crypto/web3 app is short-term greed and not building a trustworthy system.
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