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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?

#351

Post by shkkmo »

Scarblac wrote: post #51
tetha wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, but wouldn't smart contracts have to be as complex as a non-smart contract, if a smart contract were to replace the dumb contract? If I'm looking at the regular B2B contracts I'm supporting at work, even normal contracts are already testing people. Piling (highly complicated, mind you) software on top of that problem seems nuts and entirely not feasible.

Non-smart contracts also have something like the two sides having an understanding of what the spirit of what they agreed was, and they can be discussed in court and interpreted by a judge when all else fails. So not absolutely everything has to be spelled out all the time. Smart contracts are code and there is no fallback mechanism in case of mistakes. They probably have to be way more complicated than non-smart con…

"Smart Contracts" are neither "smart" nor "contracts"... so it really is a poor term.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#352

Post by sanderjd »

djhworld wrote: post #95
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.

> 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.

They are indeed somewhere, but impossible to recover without cooperation from a large number of people who will be opposed to it. This happened to one of the co-creators of ethereum when his company Parity had a bug that caused them to lose millions of dollars of funding (which I think may now be worth billions) locked in a contract, much like what happened here. He tried to rally people behind a network fork to undo the change, but it didn't work. I believe this experience has a lot to do with his own blockchain project (Polkadot) having an explicit governance process that is and to change things like this without a network fork.

But this ship has sailed for ethereum!

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#353

Post by sanderjd »

RomanAlexander wrote: post #268
adjkant wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are in location X and it has been written into code that there is no way to ever remove them from X. The only difference between throwing this "money" into a black hole and this is that you can see what's in this black hole once it's in there, even if you cannot remove it. The only way to ever fix this is to rewrite the history of the blockchain which means forking the entire ETH currency by getting all mining/r…

It's a possibility if your name is Vitalik Buterin

Hard to say but my guess is that no, even he can no longer pull this off. I think he used his one freebie.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#355

Post by ripply »

ciupicri wrote: post #214
daviddoran wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even then, whenever you’re dealing with large amounts there’s risk. E.g., early on in Bitcoin’s development a user lost a lot of Bitcoin by making a small test transfer, not realising that the change (their remaining balance) was sent to a new address in their wallet. But they were running a bootable Linux Distro from a CD and didn’t save the wallet back to a USB or other permanent storage. So they’ll never have acce…

How was this possible, for the change to be sent to a new address? If I understand correctly what you're saying is that the account was split in two: one part went to the wanted destination and the rest to an unwanted destination.

Yes, this is how Bitcoin is designed and has worked from the beginning. The problem is his wallet did save the private key for the change address he just didn’t save the wallet, so it was lost - the changed address wasn’t unwanted, it was wanted, it just didn’t get saved. I believe early Bitcoin wallets generated addresses randomly so you couldn’t recover everything from a seed and had to save your wallet.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#357

Post by shkkmo »

Earw0rm wrote: post #174
Scarblac wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-smart contracts also have something like the two sides having an understanding of what the spirit of what they agreed was, and they can be discussed in court and interpreted by a judge when all else fails. So not absolutely everything has to be spelled out all the time. Smart contracts are code and there is no fallback mechanism in case of mistakes. They probably have to be way more complicated than non-smart con…

This works because of legal precedent. The equivalent in code is pre-existing libraries, and miles of them. But the law has highly developed ways of ridding itself of cruft and tech debt over time, in a way that lib dependencies really don't.

Legal precedent is a method for defining laws, not a requirement of a legal system. It is absolutely not essential to solve issues of incomplete, ambiguous, or invalid contracts.

The key factor is: human judgment

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#358

Post by ericmay »

ljm wrote: post #339
XorNot wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really can't think of an expression other then "lol" to sum up my response here for just how incredibly stupid this is, as a "platform of the future". A design which actively discourages robust programming and error handling in financial software. Wow .

It's like a libertarian utopia. Literally everything is an individual responsibility with no wider recourse. Want validation? Other people don't want to pay for stuff they're not validating... so it's on you to be careful. Accidentally fuck up? Not our problem, that's on you for not calling the right API. Want your money back? We're not paying money to cover for other people's mistakes. You're on your own bud.

Ok… but then if you’re going to throw out these cases you should also address how markets can fix these issues, such as great customer service: “when I fucked up they helped me out, they’ll get more of my business”, or maybe insurance, or just better products that don’t have these issues.

Idk why people conflate libertarianism with this hyper-individualist stuff. It really isn’t the case.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#359

Post by NikolaeVarius »

dTal wrote: post #311
xtracto wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#360

Post by sanderjd »

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?

The DAO is a big reason why (culturally) this kind of thing can no longer be done. That was a defining moment for the culture and is seen as a growing pain but also a "never again" moment.
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