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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?

#181

Post by href »

rosndo wrote: post #159
posterboy wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, if you do that and the other party runs off with the money you’re screwed. You can certainly pursue the matter in civil courts, but law enforcement does not like to touch this kind of stuff at all. If the recipient transfers the money overseas, you will most likely never be able to recover it.

I don't think that's the case everywhere. In Switzerland at least, if I send you money by mistake, I can claim that money back and you would have to give it back to me, even if you have spent it already - unless you can reasonably claim that you were unaware that this money was not meant for you.

As a result, if I received a large amount of money that I coulnd't explain, I would contact the sender or the bank first. I can't just spend it immeditaly and claim that I had no idea.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#182

Post by ajb »

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?

Systemd for clusters

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#183

Post by mattdesl »

Adrox wrote: post #115
ipnon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

Interacting with a contract by sending it tokens (and having no idea what the outcome will be) is about as risky behaviour as you can imagine, and is quite a lot like using a low level API to circumvent the guardrails put in place by typical payment processors.

Certainly client and wallet UX can be dramatically improved to mitigate these problems. And education more generally about the risks of interacting with smart contracts, which there are many.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#184

Post by dTal »

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…

There are, of course, other industries with financial incentives against safety features. We usually regulate them.

We can point and laugh at this one person, but according to the reddit thread they're the 265th person to make this mistake, and more than half of the money in the inaccessible account is not theirs.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#185

Post by distances »

posterboy wrote: post #142
dividuum wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where would it be non-reversible? At least in Europe you totally do not own money that is transferred to your bank account by mistake. You'll have to pay it all back. There have been court cases after people spent such windfalls, and yes, they are still in the hook for full returns.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#186

Post by riffraff »

noduerme wrote: post #165
jazzyjackson wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Back in the day or at least when I ran my own bitcoin node, any call against the blockchain was free. This sounds like someone charging for hitting the API on a rented node, as opposed to an actual cost imposed by the currency to consult the blockchain (?) But maybe the contract-generators aren't even running their own node, just piggybacking on someone else's API. Sure. Cheaper.

AFAIU, smart contracts on the ethereum VM can be arbitrarily complex, so you pay the network to execute them, or a random user with an infinite loop would bring down the network.

You are indeed renting a machine to run some code, and if you want many people to use your code you want to make it cheap. There's a trade off.

You can fuck up things on the BTC blockchain too, "burning" crypto by sending it to a dead address has been a thing for a long time.

It always seemed stupid to me that it was possible, compared to sending money to an invalid IBAN, but I'm not a crypto enthusiast so I may be biased.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#187

Post by RaiausderDose »

mudita wrote: post #49
tommek4077 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans do not understand money transfer, they are still using cheques and western union. To everyone: If you wrongly send money to a mistyped IBAN it is gone.

I made a transfer with a mistyped IBAN once in the online interface of my German bank. The bank called me a day later and said that there’s something wrong with my IBAN, so I double-checked, realised my mistake and did the same transfer to the correct IBAN. I did not loose any money.

every online interface would check the IBAN checksum, this seems like a bad bank or a bad story aka lie.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#188

Post by tetha »

masklinn wrote: post #79
hughrr wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

From what I understood of afidrya explanation (in a sub-comment): * there's a smart contract to which you can send ETH (directly), it sends WETH back * however the inverse operation (WETH -> ETH) is not done by sending the WETH, you're supposed to call a special conversion function of the contract I guess the smart contract only looks for ETH in its wallet (at its address), it ignores the WETH entirely, and thus the…

> Or a currency conversion machine where you can shove USDs in the slot to get EURs, but if you shove EURs in, to the shredder they go,

This example is kinda funny. If your bank notes were accidentally damaged in germany, you could send them to the federal bank and have them replaced as long as more than half of the bank note can be reconstructed. This is a service intended especially for victims of fire or flood catastrophes, though dog related accidents aren't unheard of either.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#189

Post by quickthrower2 »

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.

This is not necessary a problem? If someone waxes lyrical about nodes, pods, containers and ingress and you know nothing of kubernetes it will sound like jargon soup. But people can understand kubernetes and build services with them, and present UIs using these elements that ordinary people can use.
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