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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?

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed, an "immutable black hole" could be described as a shredder, agree. But that's not what that address is. The semi-official "black hole" address for Ethereum is 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000000000000000000000000...), currently has $29,461,295.02 worth of ETH in it. Any other (valid) address is just another address on the network.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#432
post #381

Here's an unrelated but related question: How do you store your wallet / private keys where you would be comfortable storing an amount of money that's important to you? It feels like a bunch of consumer grade options we have are kind of flaky: Flash drives are extremely undependable. I've had a few fail to read after sitting in a closet for a year. SSDs can supposedly have data loss pretty quickly if left unpowered (…

Are lock boxes in banks still a thing in the US?

In Europe you have to go to some central bank to get such a service, I don't think medium cities branches do that.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#433
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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

Ahahahahahha. Ahahahahahahahahahha. Ahahahahahhahahahahahahahah.

--- several minutes of laughter later ---

Markets don't care and they will not fix these issues, because suckers losing money is a much better market proposition than losing money on customer support.

Fo go ahead and learn some history, will you? Almost every single regulation we have in place is precisely because markets never ever fix things.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#434
post #432
post #381

Here's an unrelated but related question: How do you store your wallet / private keys where you would be comfortable storing an amount of money that's important to you? It feels like a bunch of consumer grade options we have are kind of flaky: Flash drives are extremely undependable. I've had a few fail to read after sitting in a closet for a year. SSDs can supposedly have data loss pretty quickly if left unpowered (…

Are lock boxes in banks still a thing in the US? In Europe you have to go to some central bank to get such a service, I don't think medium cities branches do that.

> In Europe you have to go to some central bank to get such a service, I don't think medium cities branches do that.

What? No. It's absolutely normal even in very small towns (~ 5k). Also, post offices offer the service.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#435
post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So your definition for "valid action" is just that the eth network lets them do it? Yes, this is indeed the definition for "valid", that the protocol allows them to do it. It was a valid action, but not the action the user actually wanted to perform. There are two ways of avoiding these scenarios: A) use UIs and don't interact with the protocol without safeguards, as the UI will prevent you from making mistakes (th…

As far as I can tell, no one has argued that transaction validation for this specific smart contract should be built into wallets. You're arguing with a straw man. The point I see made instead is that the smart contract should not be coded to behave as it does. If a financial product at a retail bank set a pile of cash on fire when you used it incorrectly, regulators would swoop in and make the industry add some safe…

It's very hard to draw parallels from cryptocurrencies to other things as it's not like other things we have today.

Some sort of analogy could be margin calls/puts. Imagine someone who doesn't know how margin trading works used it, and lost half a million dollars. Who's at fault here? The bank for allowing it, the financial system for having the feature or the user for not educating themselves enough to understand how it works?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#436
post #381

Here's an unrelated but related question: How do you store your wallet / private keys where you would be comfortable storing an amount of money that's important to you? It feels like a bunch of consumer grade options we have are kind of flaky: Flash drives are extremely undependable. I've had a few fail to read after sitting in a closet for a year. SSDs can supposedly have data loss pretty quickly if left unpowered (…

This is what stresses me out the most about crypto. The supposed gold standard is a hardware wallet and access is done via 12-word recovery phrase but even that is sketchy. If I'm not wrong all an attack has to do is get recovery phrase and load it into another hardware wallet if they don't have mine, this is functionality is there if the hardware wallet fails. If I've been doxxed and have several mil in crypto, thie…

> thieves can break into my house steal and crack my safe or hold me at knifepoint and ask me to open it.

you: "sorry, i have a multi-sign wallet and the other signatory lives at the other end of the world"

thieves: understandable, have a nice day

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#438
post #381

Here's an unrelated but related question: How do you store your wallet / private keys where you would be comfortable storing an amount of money that's important to you? It feels like a bunch of consumer grade options we have are kind of flaky: Flash drives are extremely undependable. I've had a few fail to read after sitting in a closet for a year. SSDs can supposedly have data loss pretty quickly if left unpowered (…

Same as everything else, safe deposit box https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_deposit_box

Even on Wikipedia they write it is a "legacy service" so it is more like movie gimmick than something useful.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what stresses me out the most about crypto. The supposed gold standard is a hardware wallet and access is done via 12-word recovery phrase but even that is sketchy. If I'm not wrong all an attack has to do is get recovery phrase and load it into another hardware wallet if they don't have mine, this is functionality is there if the hardware wallet fails. If I've been doxxed and have several mil in crypto, thie…

> thieves can break into my house steal and crack my safe or hold me at knifepoint and ask me to open it. you: "sorry, i have a multi-sign wallet and the other signatory lives at the other end of the world" thieves: understandable, have a nice day

Actual thieves: "Cool. We're going to kidnap you and beat you until your other signatory coughs up access."

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#440
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…

If I tried to buy "Applr" instead of "Apple", then either:

a) There is a company called "Applr", so I at least have something (a different stock)

b) There is no comany called "Applr", so the trade is cancelled.

This is like saying "You tried to be Applr, that doesn't exist, so you money just got blackholed".

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