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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?

#541

Post by ciupicri »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #383
capableweb wrote: post #228

Since 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.

Traditional financial systems don't have solutions even for small typos [1]. Modern financial systems on the other hand have switched to IBAN which has a checksum.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/dec/07/i-lost-my-1930...

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#542

Post by postalrat »

disruptalot wrote: post #262
ddtaylor wrote: post #58

I love how everyone assumes that the ETH blockchain is immutable and there is nothing that can happen to undo any of this. Did everyone simply forget when the Dao had a contract bug and the ETH devs literally just rolled back the transaction?

Something happening once does not mean it will happen again. There have been numerous huge hacks in the past 5 years, even where the losses were from the most influential of holders and no action was taken (e.g. parity bugs). A bug and reversal occurred in the first few years of Bitcoin's existence that has effectively meant that Bitcoin won't reach the stated 21m coins exactly. It's guaranteed at this point that the…

> It's guaranteed at this point that there won't be any further reversals.

What if a new bug is found and someone moves all coins to some impossible address?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#543

Post by GaylordTuring »

dTal wrote: post #184
jazzyjackson wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from the reddit comments, similar question, apparently every instruction adds gas fees to running the contract, so if you're going to use the contract a lot, you leave out any kind of validation. >> Wow why didn't the contract creators think this through and block requests to the contract > Because adding that check would increase the cost of every user transaction. All AMM swaps would be done with WETH so it’s the r…

There are, of course, other industries with financial incentives against safety features. We usually regulate them. We can point and laugh at this one person, but according to the reddit thread they're the 265th person to make this mistake, and more than half of the money in the inaccessible account is not theirs.

And that's just for this particular token. You can go to just about any token contract and see how numerous people have sent their tokens to the contract address itself.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#544

Post by triangleman »

pie_flavor wrote: post #462
Maursault wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he sent tokens to smart contract's address and they will stay there forever, not associated with any account. Wait... so the tokens are really still there, just inaccessible? In what way do the tokens still exist? What makes them inaccessible? Is there really no possibility of restoring the tokens? No possibility of cleverly hacking them out with the assumed myriad of unpublished security flaws?

The tokens are a number in a hash-map of user to balance in the weth program. Any eth program ("smart contract") can be a user. All the smart contract that owns the tokens has to do is tell the weth smart contract to transfer them, or approve mister redditor to transfer them on the contract's behalf. But that contract wasn't built to do such a thing. And now that it's published, it also can't be updated to do such a…

So, could the Ethereum community get together and agree to rewrite the blockchain and undo this transaction? Perhaps they could vote on it and have a hearing of the facts. Of course that introduces its own tyranny but is it possible?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#545

Post by tim333 »

axiosgunnar wrote: post #314
noduerme wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On BTC, you could send things to the wrong address, yes. But you can't send the wrong type of currency or send it to a nonexistent address. In this case it seems like the contract has created the black hole (not the Ethereum blockchain itself), but that's even more absurd since someone ultimately should have control over everything that was put into the contract, regardless of the source.

> But you can't send the wrong type of currency or send it to a nonexistent address Of course you can do both things, which is why catastrophic financial ruin is a daily fear when dealing with cryptocurrencies. https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-find-my-Bitcoin-cash-that-I-...

That's impressive, the number of scammers on that thread.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#546

Post by dpark »

emteycz wrote: post #515
dpark wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don’t usually store 500k on their PCs.

But people run production servers on their PCs all the time.

The set of people running a service with a revenue of 500k on a personal device must be minuscule and the people doing it almost certainly know it’s stupid.

This is qualitatively different from crypto that allows you to burn your money on accident, while the people who build the infrastructure for this tell you is a smart, safe place to put your money.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#547

Post by magicjosh »

noduerme wrote: post #41
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…

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 sounds like those arguments you'd hear between kids in junior high over magic cards or pogs or something.

"Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones. When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter."

From http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#548

Post by dralley »

dmitriid wrote: post #433
ericmay wrote: post #358

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.

> 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 a…

That is not entirely true. Stock exchanges will reverse some clearly erroneous trades, even when they are not required to by law, because people trade more when they feel protected against mistakes.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#549

Post by telxosser »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #45
ab_testing wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a problem with crypto that will forever prevent it from becoming mainstream. The average person understands the concept of money but understanding smart contracts is out of scope for a large part of the general population m

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...

It seems to me the philosophical mistake is that banking and financial system regulations came about randomly. As if these are just unintended software bugs. As if there was no reason for the regulations.

So all this complexity to get around regulations but you are going to run into the reasons this regulation came about at some scale.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#550

Post by beefield »

capableweb wrote: post #522
ljm wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But of course they can - if they are the right persons, that is. (See DAO hack. Of course, that did defeat the whole purpose of smart contracts but nobody was willing to notice.)
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