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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?

#171

Post by colesantiago »

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.

TL;DR: He completely lost his money by entering the wrong details rather than testing payment first.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#173

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

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…

“Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” And now in a whole new way!

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#174

Post by Earw0rm »

Scarblac wrote: post #51
tetha wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, but wouldn't smart contracts have to be as complex as a non-smart contract, if a smart contract were to replace the dumb contract? If I'm looking at the regular B2B contracts I'm supporting at work, even normal contracts are already testing people. Piling (highly complicated, mind you) software on top of that problem seems nuts and entirely not feasible.

Non-smart contracts also have something like the two sides having an understanding of what the spirit of what they agreed was, and they can be discussed in court and interpreted by a judge when all else fails. So not absolutely everything has to be spelled out all the time. Smart contracts are code and there is no fallback mechanism in case of mistakes. They probably have to be way more complicated than non-smart con…

This works because of legal precedent.

The equivalent in code is pre-existing libraries, and miles of them. But the law has highly developed ways of ridding itself of cruft and tech debt over time, in a way that lib dependencies really don't.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#175

Post by riffraff »

Earw0rm wrote: post #130
masklinn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 irredee…

It also cannot be a legal basis for anything, because the law doesn't treat the right or ability to enter in to contracts as an absolute. Think minors, wards, power of attorney. Contract law is one of the more mechanistic parts of the legal system, but only up to a point. There are good reasons the legal profession - even corporate law - tends to attract a different set of personality traits to software development.

there's also the concept of a contract itself being invalid even if people have some right to enter it.

E.g. if you sign a contract while hanging off a cliff to give some dude all your assets in exchange for being pulled up, it is invalid in my jurisdiction.

Or if the people signing the contracts did not actually understand what they were signing it can be considered invalid (which would be akin to the mess in TFA).

Contracts are better left to people, rather then computers.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#176

Post by RaiausderDose »

noduerme wrote: post #41
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…

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…

I would not really call a "one way only exchange contract" magical knowledge.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#177

Post by dTal »

denni9th wrote: post #120
invalidusernam3 wrote: post #97

If 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.

>irregardless

Friendly heads up - this isn't a word, and also happens to be one of those slip-ups that people will judge you extra hard for. Say either "regardless" or "irrespective".

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#178

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#179

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

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.

Maybe the real WETH was the friends he made along the way?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#180

Post by bondarchuk »

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.

Everyone else holding eth just got a little richer :)
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