Could there be a big warning where you type “IAmAnIdiot” to continue for common mistakes like this? Built into all wallets like MetaMask.
Did I just lose half a million dollars?
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Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The problem with crypto is despite your explanation, I have no idea what any of your post means. Not any of it. Not entirely sure what point you're trying to make here. Or, in other words: the exact same thing happens to my 80 year old grandmother when I explain about my android phone. Doesn't make the device any less useful.
Do we really think women with grandchildren can’t understand Android phones?
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Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?
#113Crypto 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?
If you don't know 100% what you're doing in crypto you're less crypto-fit and your branch is prone to pruning from the crypto 'tree of life'.
Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?
#114I 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.
Which is exactly what ETH already did years ago with the Dao. There was no technical reason for the rollback/fork. It was just that too many people would lose money because of a bug in a contract. A contract that explicitly said "this is the code" regardless of bugs. So yeah, lol.
Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?
#115This 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-dest…
What's frustrating is there are already many decentralized exchanges handling billions of dollars a day that perfectly solve this problem. If you insist on making bank deposits by tunneling into their servers and writing C, don't complain when they can't find your money later. Use the app!
He seems to have used MetaMask! He was not writing any code or “tunneling into their servers”!
Unless MetaMask is not recomended anymore and I should use centralized websites that I have no idea what code they are running?
Even my bank that has a REST API would probably tell me where the money went, instead of “it’s gone”.
Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?
#116The 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.
> Unrecoverable. I'm not very well versed in this stuff, but surely the tokens he sent are somewhere right. Like if you sent $500k to a bank but put the wrong account number in, the $500k would still go _somewhere_. It might be difficult to recover, but it's not like the money just disappears.
Unfortunately in this case, there is literally nothing anyone can do. The Ethereum is sitting in dead space not associated with any address. It's literally untouchable since you cannot change the contract.
Hopefully this isn't the person's life savings.
Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?
#117Is 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…
>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? :)
If you read the followup, that man ended up getting his money back. Additionally, it would be astronomically unlikely to make a mistake like that nowadays because confirmation of payee is used so widely (banks check that the name of your recipient matches the intended name before completing a transaction).
[0] https://www.psr.org.uk/publications/consultations/cp19-4-con...
Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?
#118The 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.
> Unrecoverable. I'm not very well versed in this stuff, but surely the tokens he sent are somewhere right. Like if you sent $500k to a bank but put the wrong account number in, the $500k would still go _somewhere_. It might be difficult to recover, but it's not like the money just disappears.
They are in location X and it has been written into code that there is no way to ever remove them from X. The only difference between throwing this "money" into a black hole and this is that you can see what's in this black hole once it's in there, even if you cannot remove it.
The only way to ever fix this is to rewrite the history of the blockchain which means forking the entire ETH currency by getting all mining/record nodes to agree to it.
Long story short: Virtually unrecoverable without large coordination from the entire ETH community.
Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?
#119If I was not 100% confident in performing this transaction (which I would never be) I would send $1 as a test before sending the other $499,999. Is there a technical reason preventing one doing a test transaction first?
Even then, whenever you’re dealing with large amounts there’s risk. E.g., early on in Bitcoin’s development a user lost a lot of Bitcoin by making a small test transfer, not realising that the change (their remaining balance) was sent to a new address in their wallet. But they were running a bootable Linux Distro from a CD and didn’t save the wallet back to a USB or other permanent storage. So they’ll never have access to those keys.
Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?
#120If I was not 100% confident in performing this transaction (which I would never be) I would send $1 as a test before sending the other $499,999. Is there a technical reason preventing one doing a test transaction first?
The downside to doing this is you have to pay the transaction fee twice, once for the $1 and once for the $499,999. The transaction fee is a fixed amount irregardless of how much is being transferred, so it's definitely better to pay the fee twice than risk losing it all if you are even slightly unsure.