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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?

#191

Post by riffraff »

noduerme wrote: post #105
BatteryMountain wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the address was valid, the problem is that there is no way of getting the coins out of it.

The same thing was done on the bitcoin chain, e.g. counterparty[0] was relying on a "proof of burn" which was basically "Send BTC to a black hole".

[0] https://counterparty.io/docs/faq-xcp/

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#192

Post by jdvh »

masklinn wrote: post #82
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…

> 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…

Even encryption algorithms proven correct later turned out to be critically flawed.

The legal system is such a quagmire because figuring out what is "right" in all scenarios is anything but obvious. That's how we end up with laws we don't enforce and technical legal behavior that will still get you into trouble. But what's the alternative? Robot justices? No thanks.

If the complexity is in the nature of the problem, then smart contracts must contain all of this complexity. But how can you ever write smart contracts that are bug free and deal with every contingency?

Instead of making systems that are buggy, cold, and unforgiving we should be making systems that are more tolerant of human mistakes.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#193

Post by distances »

alanfranz wrote: post #33
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.

> mistyped Very unlikely, the checksum would prevent that. And most banks (even though I’m unsure it is mandatory) will check the recipient, if totally mismatched a warning will be raised. But if you send money to the wrong iban+recipient, the money is gone.

It is not gone. You may have to go through courts if the recipient does not return the money voluntarily though.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#194

Post by proto-n »

yumraj wrote: post #103

I understand ETH, but WTF is WETH?

Eth is the native token, WETH is an ERC20 token (token creted by a contract implementing the ERC20 interface). Many applications don't want to handle these separately, so they only accept ERC20 tokens. WETH is Eth wrapped in a token contract (can be warpped or unwrapped 1:1). Think of it as similar to Java's int vs Integer.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#195

Post by Ekaros »

daviddoran wrote: post #119
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?

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 acce…

Ah, that sounds like lovely use case for average users with higher than 0 chance of blackouts... Right timing bad design(sensible one) and it is all gone...

So in the end regular user probably ends up doing everything on centralized wallets or exchanges and then those are likely to do some off-chain book keeping as that is cheaper... Brining us back to banking...

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#196

Post by Jenk »

jrimbault wrote: post #93
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…

Especially in that real law is left for judges to interpret, and that's a deliberate feature to allow "wiggle" room.

Juries are the ultimate arbiter of law application. For this very reason.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#197

Post by 7steps2much »

tommek4077 wrote: post #18
ab_testing wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a problem with crypto that will forever prevent it from becoming mainstream. The average person understands the concept of money but understanding smart contracts is out of scope for a large part of the general population m

Just because you can do crazy stuff, doesn't mean you have to do it. Like the normal guy isn't trading interst rate derivates or stuff like that. Also at least with european banking, if you wringly send money to another account, it is also gone forever. A lot of scams regarding old people build up on this. We do not need to buy google play store vouchers like the americans tonget scammed.

> Also at least with european banking, if you wringly send money to another account, it is also gone forever.

It's not though? The money is still legally yours and can be recovered via the legal system. Only if it is moved out of Europe into less well regulated areas it becomes a problem.

This happens in every case though. If I give you cash and you take it to god knows where it can't be recovered either. If I give you money and let you leave with it then there is only so much any system can do.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#198

Post by exegete »

dTal wrote: post #177
denni9th wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

It most definitely is a word irregardless of your feelings about it https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irregardless

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#199

Post by u-rate »

repomies69 wrote: post #68
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?

It is immutable, unless in some cases it is not. However of majority of us plebs it is practically immutable.

Isn‘t that exactly like the status quo with banks?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#200

Post by rob_c »

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…

So to paraphrase. Broken technology with serious bugs

Therefore anyone looking to do anything other than gain speculative wealth should stay well away.

Another one born every minute...

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