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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?

#471

Post by [deleted] »

axiosgunnar wrote: post #323
sshine wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Account numbers have checksums. An „off by one“ typo cannot occur.

[deleted]

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#472

Post by njarboe »

shadowgovt wrote: post #439
instagraham wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

Many people are very rich and don't own crypto. You can kidnap them also and do the same thing. This is common in many parts of the world. The US used to have this problem also and got it under control by the state focusing on capturing kidnappers and putting them in jail. Crypto does make the transfer of anonymous money a bit easier, but so does motor vehicles.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#473

Post by pjc50 »

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 (…

> where you would be comfortable storing an amount of money that's important to you?

I wouldn't. I'd give it to an insured institution in my local jurisdiction to look after. It's not a perfect solution but it doesn't rely on the horrible impermanence of IT.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#474

Post by sethaurus »

kilroy123 wrote: post #407
proto-n wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eth is the native token, WETH is an ERC20 token (token creted by a contract implementing the ERC20 interface). Many applications don't want to handle these separately, so they only accept ERC20 tokens. WETH is Eth wrapped in a token contract (can be warpped or unwrapped 1:1). Think of it as similar to Java's int vs Integer.

But why?

Lots of different things live on the Ethereum blockchain: there's ETH itself, which we might call "raw money", and then there are abstract tokens (of both the fungible and non-fungible sort).

To make a programming analogy, there are lots of systems which are "generic" over tokens — they can deal with many kinds of token, as long as it's the standard shape. Raw money doesn't have this shape, so WETH is a very simple "wrapper token". You can trade 1 ETH for 1 WETH and then use it in some token-compatible system.

The exchange rate for WETH is fixed by the (very short) contract, and it's supposed to be simple to trade money for tokens or vice versa — although given this poor sod's story, it's arguably not that simple after all.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#475

Post by bigtex88 »

fsh wrote: post #69
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…

I still don't get WETH. What is the purpose of exchanging ETH, which is a token on the Ethereum blockchain, for WETH, which is also a token on the Ethereum blockchain (with the same nominal value)?

WETH is Wrapped Ether. It fulfills the conditions of an ERC-20 token, so other contracts always interact with WETH not ETH. Most of this is obfuscated away so that users don't have to have WETH in their wallet for transactions.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#476

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

capableweb wrote: post #430
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #414

Earlier 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!

And this mentality is what will block wider adoption of crypto. Calling people dumb for not understanding a non-intuitive system (after there's so much prior, "return to sender" art in the world) will not get them to use crypto.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#477

Post by robbiepapiere »

CydeWeys wrote: post #397
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 (…

Paper backups are the best option for this. Private keys are simple enough that a whole wallet can be printed to a single piece of paper using an OCR-friendly font.

I wouldn‘t send it to a printer (and certainly not generate the passphrase on a computer that is connected to the internet). Write by hand, it is only 12 to 24 words.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#478

Post by ciupicri »

rosndo wrote: post #349
ciupicri wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think there's a misunderstanding here. If the customer mistypes the IBAN account number, the bank (website, app etc) will automatically reject it as invalid immediately, he won't have to deal with the customer service.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#479

Post by capableweb »

SantalBlush wrote: post #458
capableweb wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But then please share with me what the argument is? The user made a transfer that shouldn't have been done in the first place, and somehow people are saying that the protocol should have safe-guards against doing transfers to the wrong address, but how is the protocol supposed to know what address is right/wrong? There is literally no distinction between them, so therefore you need to allow any transfer, or no transfer.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#480

Post by TacticalCoder »

I have literally zero clue as to how that ETH/WETH smart contract work but...

Why the heck did the guy not first did a test with 1 000 USD worth of coins instead of 500 000 USD? Once he sees everything is cool with 1 000 USD, he sends the rest. Sounds like 101 to me.

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