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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?

#281

Post by wbl »

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…

If this happened at a bank everyone involved would fix it and have a nice laugh the next day.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#282

Post by disruptalot »

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.

Why are those related?

The purpose of requiring energy to operate the network is to have something at stake when enforcing rules of the system. You could have unlimited or even arbitrary inflation of the currency while still requiring proof of work.

Hence, the rule that is being enforced by PoW here is that sending to a "wrong" address is not reversible.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#283

Post by disruptalot »

0x64 wrote: post #265
brodo wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The parent might be conflating inflation with the price of Ethereum going up? It's a common perception. But at least in the crypto world, inflation is understood as the value of the currency going down.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#284

Post by noduerme »

oefrha wrote: post #266
capableweb wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

This is the right way. Default behavior for any box should be to bounce. I forward all my wrong mail to a black hole but that's because I'm not a fucking smart contract

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#285

Post by unfocussed_mike »

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…

Unless I have got this wrong (I don't understand this very well at all), the reason the DAO fork happened is that it disappeared some important people's money and they had the clout to alter everyone else's cryptofinancial reality to get it back.

There would seem to be disincentives to prioritising fixing problems like this that affect unimportant people.

It strikes me as valuable to the crypto world that the mainstream media criticism of cryptofinance is that it is environmentally unfriendly. That is almost a distraction from the fact that it is antisocial and nihilistic.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#286

Post by wbl »

in3d wrote: post #209

It's not a great situation that this is possible but you could make a similar error for the same amount of money in your brokerage account and also have no recourse. It could be a typo in the ticker symbol, you could buy an option for the wrong month, you could buy instead of selling, you could enter an extra zero, you could not notice a multiplier for the futures, you could let a physical delivery future expire, etc…

Erroneous trades get busted. If you sell for 10 and the price was 100 it will get corrected.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#287

Post by noduerme »

RedShift1 wrote: post #128
BatteryMountain wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It truly is laughable. Ever heard of "Return to Sender" in case of invalid events/transactions?

The thing is that is not an invalid transaction. The problem is in what happens _after_ the smart contract has received the money.

As far as Ethereum is concerned it's valid, but the contract API is riding on top of Ethereum's blockchain. It's middleware. It's responsible for enforcing the contract. How does it have a giant black hole in it?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#288

Post by captn3m0 »

cliftonk wrote: post #15

there's about $20b worth of eth in the weth contract. $1.1m of eth has been lost this way (so op's lost weth is about 45% of all weth lost from transfers). https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead...

What’s the other 20b worth of eth for?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#289

Post by xtracto »

Gareth321 wrote: post #229
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…

This is indeed the level of knowledge required for even just transferring ETH to another person/wallet. There are different kinds of ETH, and if you transfer to the wrong kind of wallet, you lose everything. Despite the protestations of advocates, this kind of thing is a major hurdle to adoption.

I'm a cryptocurrencies/blockchain advocate in general but this wETH/BnbEth/sETH/stETH and similar crap is just crazy and stupid.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#290

Post by jb1991 »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #279

How did this just drop off the front page so quickly with 206 points in 6 hours? Anyway, I thought this comment by the OP was interesting... I thought a test transaction of sending ETH and getting WETH back was enough proof. My mistake was that I made an assumption about the reverse direction. Didn't see anywhere (including the official site) that we shouldn't directly interact with the contract and we have to use a…

I’m just guessing, but maybe it was flagged. By multiple users. That would not affect the vote count I don’t think, but it would affect its ranking on the page.
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