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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?

#341
post #265
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?

Destroying ETH is indeed widely considered a good thing. Since the middle of last year, a portion of the fees for every transaction is burned and most ethereum people seem very pleased by this. I've lost track but for a long time last year, ETH was indeed deflationary. The sense is that the value of burned ETH is distributed to everyone on the network in proportion to how much ETH they have.

I don't think it seems so great though...

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#342
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

an immutable black hole might as well be a shredder. the OP in the reddit did precisely that. that money is GONE. locked away forever. it has not been transferred to anyone else.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#343

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…

Can someone explain this in plain English for a newbie that isn’t familiar with these complicated crypto technologies?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#344

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…

I think this is a symptom of the general problem of calling everything "cryptocurrency", which anchors people on the mental model of Bitcoin. You were involved in "cryptocurrency" 2011 when everything was Bitcoin or essentially just a fork of Bitcoin and all of the stuff in the comment you replied to was a few years away from existing. I think it would be like writing "applications" in the early 90s in Visual Basic a…

> I think this is a symptom of the general problem of calling everything "crypto", which anchors people on the mental model of Bitcoin.

Or those of us who immediately think of AES, RSA, and Diffie–Hellman.

Anyone around tech in the 1990s may also remember:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#345

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's immutable unless the grifters-in-chief lose their investment.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#346

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…

I would not really call a "one way only exchange contract" magical knowledge.

Exactly. And to the critics in this thread, a thing is not necessarily faulty because you fail to understand it.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Uh, do you really like socks that much? I think this is something very easy to verify, just look at the burn address on the chain?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#349
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it a bad example? Not everyone uses IBANs. And besides, big banks still have to deal with checksum-passing iban typos on a daily basis. IBANs only have two check digits.

> big banks still have to deal with checksum-passing iban typos on a daily basis Citation needed.

This is elementary school level math, no citation needed. The modulo 97 checksum offers known guarantees.
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