Did I just lose half a million dollars? • Hacker News Board

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#311

Post by dTal » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 1:34 PM UTC

xtracto wrote: post #292

dTal wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sheesh. No good deed goes unpunished, eh? From the link:

>We label irregardless as “nonstandard” rather than “slang.” When a word is nonstandard it means it is “not conforming in pronunciation, grammatical construction, idiom, or word choice to the usage generally characteristic of educated native speakers of a language.” Irregardless is a long way from winning general acceptance as a standard English word. For that reason, it is best to use regardless instead.

Like I said - I really don't care what you do. I'm just trying to be helpful. Use "irregardless" and people will judge you. If you want to die on that hill, be my guest.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#312

Post by dorkwood » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 1:35 PM UTC

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…

Aren't posts with more comments than points downweighted?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#313

Post by erikbye » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 1:35 PM UTC

noduerme wrote: post #41

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…

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#314

Post by axiosgunnar » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 1:38 PM UTC

noduerme wrote: post #260

riffraff wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIU, smart contracts on the ethereum VM can be arbitrarily complex, so you pay the network to execute them, or a random user with an infinite loop would bring down the network. You are indeed renting a machine to run some code, and if you want many people to use your code you want to make it cheap. There's a trade off. You can fuck up things on the BTC blockchain too, "burning" crypto by sending it to a dead addres…

On BTC, you could send things to the wrong address, yes. But you can't send the wrong type of currency or send it to a nonexistent address. In this case it seems like the contract has created the black hole (not the Ethereum blockchain itself), but that's even more absurd since someone ultimately should have control over everything that was put into the contract, regardless of the source.

> But you can't send the wrong type of currency or send it to a nonexistent address

Of course you can do both things, which is why catastrophic financial ruin is a daily fear when dealing with cryptocurrencies.

https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-find-my-Bitcoin-cash-that-I-...

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#315

Post by xiphias2 » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 1:38 PM UTC

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 was Vitalik’s money. Ethereum is immutable as long as Vitalik doesn’t lose money.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#316

Post by zkldi » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 1:39 PM UTC

capableweb wrote: post #294

sshine wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So your definition for "valid action" is just that the eth network lets them do it?

They clearly didn't want to burn £500k, and that is now irrecoverable, alongside 260 other people who made the same mistake, on a smart contract that forgoes validation for gas fees.

How is this not invalid?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#317

Post by liminvorous » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 1:39 PM UTC

noduerme wrote: post #260

riffraff wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIU, smart contracts on the ethereum VM can be arbitrarily complex, so you pay the network to execute them, or a random user with an infinite loop would bring down the network. You are indeed renting a machine to run some code, and if you want many people to use your code you want to make it cheap. There's a trade off. You can fuck up things on the BTC blockchain too, "burning" crypto by sending it to a dead addres…

On BTC, you could send things to the wrong address, yes. But you can't send the wrong type of currency or send it to a nonexistent address. In this case it seems like the contract has created the black hole (not the Ethereum blockchain itself), but that's even more absurd since someone ultimately should have control over everything that was put into the contract, regardless of the source.

Sending currency to non-existant addresses is how people encode arbitary data on the bitcoin blockchain, so definitely possible.

Giving a person control over the funds allocated to their smart contract probably opens holes where they can steal the smart contract's money, though obviously creating software that handles money and can't be updated is its own kettle of fish.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#318

Post by pirate787 » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 1:39 PM UTC

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #267

Gigachad wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A service...like...a bank ?!?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#319

Post by erikbye » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 1:39 PM UTC

hughrr wrote: post #26

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…

The problem with crypto is despite your explanation, I have no idea what any of your post means. Not any of it.

Don't judge crypto by one person's poor explanation of how smart contracts and wrapped tokens work.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#320

Post by dorkwood » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 1:40 PM UTC

samarama wrote: post #190

That’s like dropping half a million dollar in USD and your account number in front of the bank at night when it’s closed and expecting the bank to credit it to your account.

What would actually happen, in this case, assuming the bank found the money? I feel like they'd most likely have to report it, rather than destroy it.