Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Did I just lose half a million dollars?

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 837 posts

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#141

Post by rvz »

noduerme wrote: post #91
richardburton wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

What could be more of a rat's nest than the crypto scams? As soon as it became possible for anyone to create a token it just became a race to the bottom. It's the ultimate recepticle for scammers.

> As soon as it became possible for anyone to create a token it just became a race to the bottom.

Exactly. All enabled and caused by Ethereum. First the ICOs, then anyone can create their own scam ERC-20 tokens, The DAO (which got hacked and hard forked to reverse the funds), NFTs (which have nothing to do with ownership), which once you scale up all of that it basically becomes unusable due to the 'gas fees' for every operation. Spend $200 to swap $1 worth of tokens using dapps like Uniswap.

One can go as far as to say that the Ethereum logo is literally a pyramid. Now what does that tell us? A pyramid scheme? who knows. From the start, they are probably trying to tell us that they know it is a scam.

At this point, everyone will eventually jump on the scheme itself anyway even when everyone knows it is a scam.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#142

Post by posterboy »

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.

I have more than once typed ref-number into the amount field. Ofc a transmission of $9765775689758 won't succeed, but if it did, I'm told there's little to be done about it, finders keepers.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#143

Post by yuvalr1 »

djhworld wrote: post #95
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.

> 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.

It is right there where he sent it. It really did not disappear. It will just sit there forever, very well documented, and very well out of reach for all of us, for the end of all times.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#144

Post by posterboy »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #117
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? :)

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...

But this costs us much much more than 500k in sum

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#145

Post by 0x_rs »

I used crypto in the past, starting a decade ago, but absolutely cannot wrap my head around these new-age concepts such as smart contracts, dozen ETH flavors and whatnot. They seem blackboxes to me no matter how much I read about them. The fact you have to use a withdrawal function instead of the reverse operation used for the initial conversion seems a pretty severe design overlook since they're burned forever this way.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#146

Post by XorNot »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #123
noduerme wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 allow…

from the reddit comments, similar question, apparently every instruction adds gas fees to running the contract, so if you're going to use the contract a lot, you leave out any kind of validation. >> Wow why didn't the contract creators think this through and block requests to the contract > Because adding that check would increase the cost of every user transaction. All AMM swaps would be done with WETH so it’s the r…

I really can't think of an expression other then "lol" to sum up my response here for just how incredibly stupid this is, as a "platform of the future".

A design which actively discourages robust programming and error handling in financial software. Wow.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#147

Post by doteka »

saboot wrote: post #138
iqanq wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are expecting to understand how a completely new and complex technology works from 5 lines of text. Imagine if someone tried to explain Kubernetes to you in 5 lines of text.

Let's try. I don't know what kubernetes does. Can anyone explain in five lines of text?

It abstracts away underlying hardware, leaving you with a convenient set of abstractions for deploying containerized networked services. Sort of an OS for a cluster of distributed machines. Unfortunately this involves lots of YAML. How’d I do?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#148

Post by djhworld »

phphphphp wrote: post #127
djhworld wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A smart contract has a set of behaviour as written in code: nodes on the network execute the behaviour. This contract doesn’t have any code to undo a mistake like this, so it is impossible to recover them. Thst said, the network is a group of machines all agreeing together on what is the correct behaviour, and that can change, so while it is not impossible forever — Ethereum might release a new feature that allows pe…

can the code be corrected though

it sounds to me like the fix would be create a new map that maps account ID -> tokens, where account ID = the "sender" account where the tokens came from, and do the migration to move these 'orphaned' tokens into the right buckets.

admittedly I guess that would break everything/trust if someone can just rewrite the code to say who has what tokens!

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#149

Post by spuz »

faizshah wrote: post #81
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.

There is such a thing as a "proxy" contract. The contract can delegate to another "delegate" contract that actually performs the functions you want. The proxy contract also has a function that allows the owner to change the address of the delegate contract. If you tell you users to interact with the proxy contract then they will always interact with the latest version of the delegate contract.

Some ERC20 tokens implement this but I believe many do not.

https://docs.openzeppelin.com/contracts/3.x/api/proxy

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#150

Post by mhitza »

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…

I was quite interested in the cryptocurrency ecosystem around 2017/2018, precisely because of the talks around smart contracts. I see these smart contracts to be just (in my opinion), confusing, error prone addressable state machines. Writing smart contracts (at least for Ethereum) has so many gotchas, that it's almost equivalent to rolling your own cryptography.

I'm not sure if issues around smart contracts are just the tooling, or developers are just rushing to push something out there; but the UX and DX is bad. I was hoping that Cardano would be a blockchain/cryptocurrency pairing that would make me interested again in this space, but their Plutus smart contracts[1] are something I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole. On the upside, at least testing Plutus smart contracts with QuickCheck seems to have brought improvements to QuickCheck itself[2]

[1] https://playground.plutus.iohkdev.io/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9_14jjJiuQ a fun little watch for those that like Haskell

Post reply on HN