Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Did I just lose half a million dollars?

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 837 posts

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#301

Post by capableweb »

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.

Hm, in order to clear up some (seemingly) confusion about how things work, let me offer you this explanation:

The user in the submission did not send funds to a invalid address. The address is valid, as otherwise funds wouldn't be able to be sent to it (the wallet would not allow you, nor the protocol, nor the miner/validators). The address happens to belong to a contract, that can also hold funds, similarly to accounts.

Now, every address/account/contract has a private-key behind it, that allows the owner of the private-key to transfer out of the address/account/contract, but it's impossible to know if the owner actually still has the private-key.

Similarly to how you can't know if john@example.com actually has access to his email account (maybe he forgot his password?), you can't know if an address actually has the possibility of moving the funds out of the address, as the private-key can have been thrown/forgotten/lost.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#302

Post by capableweb »

noduerme wrote: post #284
oefrha wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Again, if you try to send funds to an invalid address on Ethereum, you won't be able to. First the wallet will stop you if the address is invalid, secondly no miner/validator would pick it up from the mempool if the address is invalid and thirdly, no other party would agree that the address is valid and hence the transfer wouldn't go through.

Simply said: you cannot send funds to invalid addresses on Ethereum.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#303

Post by aniforprez »

noduerme wrote: post #255
kuhewa wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, chemistry sets come with a lot of graphic warnings.

Do we need a "hot coffee is hot" warning label on every crypto transaction?

And yes I'm aware the lady in the case suffered and it's terrible. I'm just being facetious

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#304

Post by in3d »

wbl wrote: post #286
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.

Only applies to some trades of some securities on some exchanges. Even in the most pedestrian cases, NYSE and Nasdaq, you can be up to 20% off after-hours and with portfolio margin this can wipe you out instantly. These rules were created to prevent glitches due to automated trading that might cause significant market meltdowns, not to correct trader's mistakes.

"Harouna Traore, who was taking a class in Paris to become a day trader, used a demonstration version of British brokerage firm Valbury Capital’s platform to learn how to trade equity futures last summer, according to the Financial Times. He opened an account at Valbury with about 20,000 euros, or $23,000.

A short time later, he was at home practicing on what he thought was the demo, racking up more than 1 billion euros of orders in U.S. and European stock futures, and losing more than 1 million euros. Then, Traore came to the shocking realization that the trades were live."

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/21/trader-builds-5-billion-posi...

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#305

Post by zucker42 »

MrPatan wrote: post #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 th…

Well the argument people would make for not buying is that, similar to buying a lottery ticket, "investing" in ETH has negative expected value (or at least EV less than opportunity cost).

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#306

Post by kuhewa »

capableweb wrote: post #293
kuhewa wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> have you ever dealt with the insides of forex trading before?

Why, is there a way to send currency directly and irrecoverably into a paper shredder on the inside?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#307

Post by djhworld »

globular-toast wrote: post #212
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.

In an accounting system, everything must always sum to zero. That means every transaction has to balance, so nothing can "appear" or "disappear", it has to come from somewhere and has to go somewhere. Imagine you ran a private currency called Mate Dollars (M$) for you and your mates to exchange with each other "off grid". You decide to introduce the concept of loans. A transaction which lends 1000M$ to MateA would lo…

I use plaintextaccounting too.

So in your example Dungeon:MateA is a balance for the other side of the transaction - it does exist, there's a record of it. The money/tokens/matebucks have not "disappeared", but the mechanics of the "promise" means that nothing/no-one can do this operation

  2022-01-30 Silly transaction
      Dungeon:MateA      -1000.00M$
      Account:MateA       1000.00M$

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#308

Post by kuhewa »

aniforprez wrote: post #303
noduerme wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, chemistry sets come with a lot of graphic warnings.

Do we need a "hot coffee is hot" warning label on every crypto transaction? And yes I'm aware the lady in the case suffered and it's terrible. I'm just being facetious

If it is ever going to solve a fraction of the societal ills promised, yeah sounds like it will need that warning.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#309

Post by capableweb »

kuhewa wrote: post #306
capableweb wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> have you ever dealt with the insides of forex trading before? Why, is there a way to send currency directly and irrecoverably into a paper shredder on the inside?

Do you actually understand what happened in this case?

No one sent any currencies into a "shredder", so not sure why you're asking this question?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#310

Post by djhworld »

spuz wrote: post #149
faizshah wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this should be the takeaway. Instead of blaming users there should be some system that allows patches, updates and new features to be published to these smart contracts. It just seems silly that any programmer would think it’s a good idea to publish some code you can’t patch and horrifying to let that code scale to this size without being able to correct any of your original assumptions.

There is such a thing as a "proxy" contract. The contract can delegate to another "delegate" contract that actually performs the functions you want. The proxy contract also has a function that allows the owner to change the address of the delegate contract. If you tell you users to interact with the proxy contract then they will always interact with the latest version of the delegate contract. Some ERC20 tokens imple…

How is the proxy contract tested - wouldn't you need to create a proxy-to-the-proxy contract just in case there is a bug and need to point it to the fixed version?
Post reply on HN