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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?

#521
post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You write down the N different Shamir passphrases of your hierarchical deterministic wallet on paper and store them in N different locations. Or for longevity and fire resistance, use metal foil and a punch.

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This is the kind of information you shouldn't post online, especially when it can be traced to your real identity.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#522
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do ethereum and smart contracts currently have excellent customer service, such that the guy in TFA can get his 500k back?

The one who has the private keys to that account could give them the ETH back, yeah. But if no one has the private keys, they can not get it back, that would defeat the entire point of cryptocurrencies in the first place.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#523
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

exactly, with no-do overs. Everyone hand codes their assembly correctly on the first try right!?!!

There are plenty of do-overs, it's called the "development phase" and involves testing things on your local computer with the team. No one gets everything right the first time, but with a lot of testing, you can actually write software that does exactly what you think it will do, and you can achieve pretty cool stuff. Remember that humans wrote the software that took humanity to the moon!

In this case, not really. User was calling a "ROM"

What you describe are dry runs.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#524
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 (…

Cryptocurrencies use mnemonic phrases as a master key for a wallet. All the private keys are generated deterministically from the master key. BIP-39 mnemonic phrase is a list of 12 or 24 words. It is quite easy to write down on a piece of paper or metal, and/or memorize. Offline hardware wallet is usually used to securely generate and use the key for signing transactions.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#525

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…

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…

Same. That top reddit comment that crypto is not ready yet is absolutely right. This feels like a small bu2ow er trting to digitalize their whole operation on 1978 micro computers and getting burned for it.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#526
post #427

Earlier 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 just that with ganache-cli.

I haven‘t tried it, because I don‘t do much crypto stuff at all, but I thought this specific functionality, to dry-run any scenario, from any account, was very intriguing.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#527
post #488

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…

> but if you deposit a bank check it just shreds the check. Why would you ever want to “shred the check”? Is this the intended functionality or a bug?

> Why would you ever want to “shred the check”?

You don't, and it's not what technically happens, but it's the closest I could find as the actual behaviour can not be replicated in the real world.

The actual behaviour, at least in my understanding, is that the bank check goes in a box to which only the ATM has access, but the ATM was never coded to look for bank checks in the box, and it's not possible to update it, so it's not possible to get the bank checks out of the box.

In the real world you could take the box out and force it open, but in "the blockchain" the contract has sole control of the wallet, an updated version of the contract would be a different contract with a different address.

> Is this the intended functionality or a bug?

It is, in the broadest sense, a bug: the contract was not coded to handle anything other than ETH inputs, so it ignores everything else, but the other things were still moved into the box.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trans…

So I guess, when it comes down to the wire, what wins out, the needs of real users, or the documented description of a protocol?

The fact that said protocol is incapable of addressing real needs is a failure state, and historically this has been addressed by building better tooling on top of the protocol, or replacing it wholesale.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#530
post #188

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…

> Or a currency conversion machine where you can shove USDs in the slot to get EURs, but if you shove EURs in, to the shredder they go, This example is kinda funny. If your bank notes were accidentally damaged in germany, you could send them to the federal bank and have them replaced as long as more than half of the bank note can be reconstructed. This is a service intended especially for victims of fire or flood cat…

AFAIK it's the same in the US (the US mint is in charge of both producing and destroying money), because treasuries want to keep track of the physical money supply.
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