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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?

#441

Post by cslarson »

Rastonbury wrote: post #403
nickjj wrote: 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…

Don't keep your backup fully available at your house for this reason. Figure out we way to split it up and distribute it, but with redundancy.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#442

Post by lottin »

shkkmo wrote: post #351
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…

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

"Dumb procedures" is more descriptive IMO.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#444

Post by fredsmith42 »

I don't know anything about crypto. Why can't he contact someone on the receiving end of the transaction and say "I really messed up, please transfer this money back to me?". I know crypto transactions can't be undone, but a new transaction of equal value in the reverse direction could be done, right? And if not, why the hell not?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#445

Post by danjac »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #328
danjac wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but celebrities and grifters aren't pushing the general public to adopt Kubernetes or bet their life savings on their understanding of it.

There certainly is a different group who pushes Kubernetes as the savior of DevOps. I’ve seen this put plenty of pressure on teams to adopt it and they’ve gone in too fast, resulting in downtime, security issues, and huge operational costs. These are real costs and can have an affect on someone’s home life and career prospects within their company. I’ve had to go in and save quite a few of these people, and they were…

Agreed - but Kubernetes won't result in you losing half a million of your assets in an instant.

I mean unless you decide to use Amazon EKS for a side project of course...

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#446

Post by e12e »

neuronic wrote: post #101
aemreunal wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So crypto is immutable, "code is law", decentralized, whatever, until people need to roll back transactions and use centralized exchanges because "they already solved these issues"? Seems like a whole lot of global warming just to re-invent a terrible imitation of banking...

> decentralized After reading Moxie's blog post on web3 [1] I feel it is a stretch to call anything Ehtereum-based decentralized anymore when this many applications use Alchemy or Infura as providers for their Ethereum nodes. [1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Thank you for that link, I see it was posted to hn, but gained little traction.

It certainly puts words to my feelings around current "crypto" trends as someone (probably like moxie) that still remember the first wave of cypherpunks[1] and dreams of digital currencies.

It feels strange when a lot of smart people insists on something that's obviously false in a practical, real-world sense - and it's nice to see someone else shine a light on that, and explain in simple, correct terms what's actually going on.

I wonder if there are any emerging systems that are more likely to realise the idea (ideals) of digital currencies and smart contracts?

I had hopes for etherum, but now I'm thinking that if we'll ever get there, it'd be in the next generation (call it third generation, bitcoin being first, etherum second - and earlier things generation zero).

I'm thinking it would be proof-of-stake, and somehow viable as real peer to peer, or split in a more sane way between infrastructure and "wallets".

[1] See eg this for a summary and some pointers https://nakamoto.com/the-cypherpunks/

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#447

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#448

Post by runeks »

CydeWeys wrote: post #406
masklinn wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understood of afidrya explanation (in a sub-comment): * there's a smart contract to which you can send ETH (directly), it sends WETH back * however the inverse operation (WETH -> ETH) is not done by sending the WETH, you're supposed to call a special conversion function of the contract I guess the smart contract only looks for ETH in its wallet (at its address), it ignores the WETH entirely, and thus the…

None of these explanations have ever covered what the hell WETH is, or the reason the person was trying to exchange it. Seems like there's still a lot of implicit assumptions in these explanations.

WETH is short for “wrapped Ether”. It’s a token issued on the Ethereum blockchain. This token conforms to the so-called ERC-20 standard, which is — essentially — the API of the token. Ether itself does not conform to the ERC-20 standard, which is why wrapping it is necessary to e.g. exchange it for other ERC-20 tokens via a smart contract designed for this purpose (confusingly called a “swap”).

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#449

Post by cecilpl2 »

sshine wrote: post #275
zo1 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Some people are super careful, like myself, when transferring money between personal (normal bank) accounts I always test with a small amount. Even if the bigger amount is like $200. And that's after triple checking the account number before clicking transfer. I can't imagine what I'd be doing with these exotic crypto accounts and smart contracts.

When I do money transfers on bank accounts, I read the 10 digits 4-5 times. If the person that I'm transfering to is in the room, I ask them to read aloud their account number as I follow. The fact that you have to get 10 digits right and that a typo can result in sending the money off somewhere unknown, disturbs me a lot. It's amazing how cryptocurrencies mimicked that part about existing digital money to perfection…

In Canada we use email for person-to-person money transfers. I transfer money to my contacts by email address. They then get an email which informs them they have a pending transfer, and allows them to deposit it into their bank account.

You can optionally register your email with the central system for autodeposit.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#450

Post by hansvm »

ozim wrote: post #432
nickjj wrote: 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.

They are, but your protections are pretty minimal. We have more theft by our government (civil asset forfeiture) than by actual thieves. Not just that, banks themselves have proven to be unreliable with boxes independent of government theft.

Example CAF case: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.latimes.com/california/stor...

Example bank fuck-up: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...

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