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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?

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> decentralized After reading Moxie's blog post on web3 [1] I feel it is a stretch to call anything Ehtereum-based decentralized anymore when this many applications use Alchemy or Infura as providers for their Ethereum nodes. [1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

It's not just nodes. It's also - exchanges - mining pools - mixers - oracles Also, core devs and all stable cryptos are "centralized" by definition. This whole ecosystem is just cancer to a traditional society. It's not an evolution.

Cancer like in the health issue? Or cancer like how Open Source (GPL) was a cancer back in the 2000s?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#292
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Fine. It's not a [standard, generally accepted] word. Feel free to disregard my advice, though; it's no skin off my nose if you don't want to sound like a "native, educated speaker".

What do you mean generally accepted word? A word is or is not a word . Dont get butthurt because you were pointed wrong after trying to correct someone.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#293
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Currencies don't come with a prerequisite of intimate knowledge of industrial jargon that requires use on a daily basis to be proficient enough in to not lose everything.

If you're gonna deal directly with the forex industry without any safe-guards there will definitely be a bunch of jargon around, have you ever dealt with the insides of forex trading before?

In general, giving someone money does not require intimate knowledge of what's happening behind the scenes, that's true. But the submission is not about a normal transfer, the user is explicitly avoiding the safe-guards in place, and got burned by it. It's no surprise really.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#294
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Indeed, and that's exactly how most cryptocurrencies work today. You try to send funds to an invalid address, the wallet will present you with an error that you cannot do that.

The user in the submission did not perform an invalid action, because they wouldn't be able to perform an invalid action.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#295
Sure, the tech is not perfect. But it will get better over time, not worse.

Soon there may be a "good version" of it that replaces a big chunk of anything financial and financializes another chunk of everything else.

Or maybe not.

I understand assigning a low probability to that event, but the upside is so big that it's still a bit weird to be just a hater and not make a lottery-ticket-sized investment.

Or I guess the chance of being able to tell randos on the internet "I told you so and they never fooled me!" in a few years if it fails must be a similar-sized reward in utility.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#296

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.

Imagine doing this with your life savings

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#297
post #145

I used crypto in the past, starting a decade ago, but absolutely cannot wrap my head around these new-age concepts such as smart contracts, dozen ETH flavors and whatnot. They seem blackboxes to me no matter how much I read about them. The fact you have to use a withdrawal function instead of the reverse operation used for the initial conversion seems a pretty severe design overlook since they're burned forever this…

I still use crypto and grok smart contracts alright. But exactly this shit of wrapped tokens, same tokens in different blockchains and whatnot is a recipe for disaster.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#298
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's exactly the same with banks, except "we" (normal plebs) cannot actually see when it happens, as compared to blockchains where all data is public. With banks it happens all the time, but no one knows, so it doesn't make the news. When it happens in blockchains (that one time), it's very obvious so it makes the news.

Why is it such a hot feature that you can see every transaction, though? Why do you care if I got my bank to revert one of my transactions?

I'll make no argument for/against cryptocurrencies here, as the discussion if it's good/bad is futile. My comment is just a statement of fact about the differences/similarities of what we have now, and what cryptocurrencies offer.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#299
post #286
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.

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