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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?

#261

Post by noduerme »

riffraff wrote: post #191
noduerme wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

If no one ever moved coins out of their burn addresses I'll eat my socks.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#262

Post by disruptalot »

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?

Something happening once does not mean it will happen again. There have been numerous huge hacks in the past 5 years, even where the losses were from the most influential of holders and no action was taken (e.g. parity bugs).

A bug and reversal occurred in the first few years of Bitcoin's existence that has effectively meant that Bitcoin won't reach the stated 21m coins exactly.

It's guaranteed at this point that there won't be any further reversals.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#263

Post by jquery »

nly wrote: post #64
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

Even in todays traditional banking system there are a litany of cases where people refuse to take responsibility for their gullible actions and expect their bank to bail them out. There are a few stories on the ThisIsMoney (UK's Daily Mail's money rag) front page right now about relatively convincing and sophisticated scams where people were robbed of thousands. The average person isn't ready for the risk of crypto.…

It’s really incredible how easy some of these scams appear to pull off. “I’m your oldest child and no my microphone doesn’t work so I can’t talk to you and I need $2000 immediately” and the parent bypasses warnings from the bank about possible fraud and shoves the transaction through…

It also shows how many of these scams can be defeated with a few simple precautions. Most of them would be defeated by calling the bank back… in other words don’t answer your phone, make all your calls outgoing. Others are defeated by simply not doing anything hastily and under duress (like urgently wiring all your money to an external account for “safekeeping”).

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#264

Post by noduerme »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #233
noduerme wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it makes it less useful if your grandmother can't use it to call you.

... or if your grandmother tries to use it and loses half a million dollars.

if my nans had that kinda money she'd have an iPhone.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#265

Post by 0x64 »

brodo wrote: post #156
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.

You have to waste energy to create ETH because ‘inflation baaad‘ but destroying ETH is possible by accident. Crypto bros should really take some macroeconomics courses.

If inflation was bad, would destroying ETH not be a good thing since it leads to what's effectively an instant deflation of supply?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#266

Post by oefrha »

capableweb wrote: post #243
oefrha wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure you’ve heard of it, but in case you haven’t, it’s called bouncing when there’s no valid inbox on the other end. Before you object, yes, you can set up a catch-all incinerator, but that’s not the default as is the case here, you have to explicitly set it up.

"Bouncing" can happen in cryptocurrency world as well, it's called "sending to an invalid address". It just happens to be that the address-space is so big you don't really know what address has a real physical person behind it or not, or yet even. Try sending cryptocurrency to an invalid address and you'll see that the wallet will reject sending it, just like email bouncing.

Most people setting up mailservers don’t consider a catch-all forwarding to /dev/null a valid inbox. And no sane mailserver software forwards to /dev/null by default if you don’t explicitly tell it what to do when it receives email it isn’t supposed to receive.

A “valid” address locking up funds sent to it without recourse is /dev/null.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#267

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

Gigachad wrote: post #52
kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is more a fundamental philosophical problem with Ethereum. They have fascinating ideas and workarounds for all sorts of issues, but in the end they keep layering complex solutions on more complex solutions. Maybe a bit like enterprise software, just add another abstraction layer...

The problem is that irreversible transactions are just bad. There is no way around it. Crypto is broken at the most fundamental level. This kind of fuckup could not happen with regular banking and if you somehow did mess up you can almost always have your money recovered. There is no way to just black hole it never to be seen again.

Afaik bank transactions are also non-reversible. I don't think that is the main issue, although certainly it is a problem.

If it bothers you, you could probably also go through some service that insures your transactions and gives you a degree of reversibility.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#268

Post by RomanAlexander »

adjkant wrote: post #118
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.

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/r…

It's a possibility if your name is Vitalik Buterin

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#269

Post by freemint »

colesantiago wrote: post #171
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.

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

He tested it by converting Euros to Dollars first, used it for a while and then put Dollars in to the same machine and they were shredded.

He did test but using the wrong mental model.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#270

Post by sshine »

capableweb wrote: post #231
noduerme wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not really edge bases, it's how contracts works, and how this contract works. There is nothing magical here. It's a bit like avoiding the checksums that IBAN has, and then complaining that IBAN is broken. Most people interact with WETH via UIs, but for some reason this user chose not to, and got severely burned because of it. Things that require expertise usually requires one to know acronyms and how things work…

Or like sticking the wrong plastic card into an ATM and observe the machine eat the card... and your bank account.

You'd expect that invalid actions lead to idempotent errors, not glitch states where you lose everything.

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