Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Did I just lose half a million dollars?
451–460 of 837 posts
Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yup. One more freebie hardfork that reverses (okay not "reverses" techbically but forks away from a previous state) some mistake/hack and Ethereum would lose trust especially competition between chains (EVM or otherwise) is so high.
Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?
#453Earlier 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…
From what I can tell, the underlying issue is that everything is spaghetti code written in a dynamically typed language. Ignoring that, it's nuts that the best practice is "send a little money, and see if it works". Apparently they don't even have a working transaction simulator that just runs the relevant logic on your laptop so you can see what it will do.
I think you can do test transaction off-chain, I think they're called test-nets and you can use them through many wallets, and even online IDE's[1]. Unfortunately, crypto is still at the stage where it's built for devs and technically minded individuals, and its pretty user hostile. Sending directly from wallet to wallet is a pretty low level thing to do, and generally people should be executing transactions through swaps or other DAPP's, which to me seems like we're working against the empowerment principle of crypto
Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
The EBITDA of eth is exactly 0, actually.
Depends on what you count as earnings; Ethereum did $9.9b in transaction fees and tips alone last year. [1] https://stark.mirror.xyz/q3OnsK7mvfGtTQ72nfoxLyEV5lfYOqUfJIo...
That's the cost the network pays to miners/core devs. So EBITDA comes out very negative
Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?
#455I 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?
This is true if the recipient is a person, but in this case it is a "Smart contract" which means it has particular programmed behavior and cannot just be asked to do something for ethical reasons. If it is not programmed to return money, it can't return money, and if it is not programmed to be reprogrammable, then it can't be reprogrammed to help this person.
Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?
#456Earlier 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…
It's not really edge bases, it's how contracts works, and how this contract works. There is nothing magical here. It's a bit like avoiding the checksums that IBAN has, and then complaining that IBAN is broken. Most people interact with WETH via UIs, but for some reason this user chose not to, and got severely burned because of it. Things that require expertise usually requires one to know acronyms and how things work…
The thing that gets overlooked here is this guy had to have an above average understanding of all this to even get into a position to make this mistake. Manually sending weth to a contract address is not a process a newbie would even conceive of doing. Or even having weth in the first place.
This guy was pretty far over on the right side of the bell curve when it comes to Ethereum knowledge.
It's still obviously a giant design gotcha that losing money this way is possible. They fact that it happened to a guy who knew probably 95% of the esoterica he needed to know to complete the transaction successfully and still got completely burned is an issue.
Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?
#457I 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?
> And if not, why the hell not?
Because he sent funds to a contract (a program) and not a person (a private key). The operation of the given contract (the actual program) cannot be altered, which is useful in the sense that you can inspect the contract code and make sure that it does what you want with the funds you send to it.
Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It was a valid action, but not the action the user actually wanted to perform." It's an action noone ever has ever wanted or ever will want to perform. In the same way putting your finger inside a power socket is an invalid action, and people who designed sockets were smart enough to make it impossible.
The only thing you're showcasing here is the lack of understanding of what happened. This transfer was a transfer from one address to another. No one has ever wanted to do that? It's the entire point of cryptocurrencies!
You are intentionally misrepresenting the parent comment. The point is not that nobody should be able to transfer from one address to another, and pretending otherwise is pretty dishonest.
Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?
#459Since no one seems to think about how this could have prevented, here is a simple way, which I've applied to lots of things in life, not just cryptocurrency transfers: - If you're making a transfer somewhere with a large amount, do a small transfer first and verify it's working. Confirm at the receiving end before moving big sums. - If you're calling a contract, try it with a small amount first. Verify the parameters…
Simpler way: use real financial instruments. Traditional financial systems have had solutions for errors like this for centuries.
Reading the reddit thread; it seems like this individual was an OG miner and just held ETH for many years. His previous time investment matured, and he decided to finally cash out.
Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is more a fundamental philosophical problem with Ethereum. They have fascinating ideas and workarounds for all sorts of issues, but in the end they keep layering complex solutions on more complex solutions. Maybe a bit like enterprise software, just add another abstraction layer...
The problem is, they have a fundamentally simple concept that solved the double spend and trust problems for a decentralized (sort of currency). That part we kind of figured out, maybe it's ok, albeit super slow and power intensive, but let's put that aside for a while. But is there a solid mathematical and cryptographical basis for everything else layered on top? I don't get that impression, it just looks like they'…
The financial system cannot run on blockchain technology, even if the technology worked well. This is because "decentralisation" requires blockchain assets to be "unconfiscable", but financing is only feasible if the assets are "confiscable" (otherwise the borrower can walk away with the money and suffer no consequences).