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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?

#551

Post by hogrider »

pjc50 wrote: post #473
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.

But there's no exchange that will hold my funds and is insured like this right? Makes me wonder if El Salvador is requiring something like that, BTC being legal tender and all.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#552

Post by m3kw9 »

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 the ERC20(coins) version of ETH. It turns ETH into coins, so the contracts have an easier time interact with it

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#553

Post by SilasX »

dahart wrote: post #499
bigtex88 wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok so the problem then seems to be with your understanding of the space, not with crypto itself. I don't go to a geneticist and go "the problem with genetics is I have no idea what any of it means".

This isn’t genetics, it’s money. Crypto needs to be simple enough for everyone to understand before it can be adopted by everyone. My kids understand stocks and back transfers, while incredibly smart and savvy people are getting confused about crypto and losing money accidentally (it’s not just this single incident, it’s a common story). This isn’t good, and shouldn’t be dismissed as people having unreasonable expect…

I agree that cryptocurrency has a ton of UX issues to work out in practice, but you don’t need the level of explanation in the top post in order to use it, so the issues mentioned aren’t relevant in practice, and aren’t a good example of “poor cryptocurrency UX for end users”.

What the redditor did was analogous to ignoring the exposed UI elements on a web page and instead opening up the console and calling the JavaScript functions directly. The average user doesn’t try to do that, and so any such failure is not an issue of the website “needing an advanced understanding”; simply following its UI elements is enough.

So it’s unfair to equate the understanding needed for the top explanation with the understanding needed to use a cryptocurrency app.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#554

Post by conroydave »

norswap wrote: post #540

Seems fishy to me when he says "I just sent ETH to the contract to get WETH" because this is assuredly not how it works. You have to call the `deposit` function of the smart contract (transfering ETH with it indeed). And to withdraw your WETH as ETH, you call `withdraw`. These calls can be made from here (power user interface! not recommended - use Uniswap instead): https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e…

are you sure the deposit function isnt automatically called?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#556

Post by ddingus »

capableweb wrote: post #534
ddingus wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, not really. User was calling a "ROM" What you describe are dry runs.

Are you talking about the user from https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/sfz4kw/did_i_just... ? And do you mean "read-only memory"? I'm not sure how that's relevant. The contract they made the transfer to is read-only yes, like any contract on Ethereum. But they could have tested the contract call with a smaller sum before actually performing the bigger one. Just like the people writing the computer that took u…

There is a difference!

The incentive was robust code that would work well, get it done, go to the moon.

Here, machine time is expensive, puts emphasis on code that works, but just barely...

Let's just say NASA would check for the "yup, you are gonna burn some money" case, and reject it.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#557

Post by mlyle »

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!

Making it easy to build contracts that will accept resources and then never do anything with them, destroying the value, is a design mistake.

This is something the developer of the contract should explicitly opt into. As others pointed out, if everything a contract did was via explicit methods, rather than transfers, this type of defect would never have been created.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#559

Post by [deleted] »

masklinn wrote: post #79
hughrr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with crypto is despite your explanation, I have no idea what any of your post means. Not any of it.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#560

Post by monktastic1 »

triangleman wrote: post #544
pie_flavor wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The chain is by nature append only, so you'd have to fork it, which they sure as hell are not going to do for a "little guy," to put it mildly. At least, that's my layman's understanding.
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