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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?

#561

Post by FDSGSG »

johnchristopher wrote: post #492
sanderjd wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a symptom of the general problem of calling everything "cryptocurrency", which anchors people on the mental model of Bitcoin. You were involved in "cryptocurrency" 2011 when everything was Bitcoin or essentially just a fork of Bitcoin and all of the stuff in the comment you replied to was a few years away from existing. I think it would be like writing "applications" in the early 90s in Visual Basic a…

It goes to show that cryptomoney has not yet a settled common set of words to describe what's happening, unlike applications which have "gui, compilers, loop, trees, objects, etc.". It's still to much specialized to follow what's going on from a higher viewpoint.

I don't think so. The terminology is quite standardised, but just like "gui, compilers, loop, trees, objects, etc." you're not going to know them unless you're familiar with the subject.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#562

Post by hnu0847 »

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…

Where should one go to learn how all of these systems work? I've been trying to make an honest effort to understand how smart contracts, protocols, decentralized exchanges, etc. work, but after reading about the absolute basics quickly get bogged down in a sea of acronyms and jargon that seemingly lacks any clear explanation. This doesn't even include all of the shills, scams, etc.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#563

Post by GaylordTuring »

noduerme wrote: post #261
riffraff wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the address was valid, the problem is that there is no way of getting the coins out of it. The same thing was done on the bitcoin chain, e.g. counterparty[0] was relying on a "proof of burn" which was basically "Send BTC to a black hole". [0] https://counterparty.io/docs/faq-xcp/

If no one ever moved coins out of their burn addresses I'll eat my socks.

Just monitor this address then and let me know if anyone moves anything out of it :) https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000000000000000000000000...

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#564

Post by te_chris »

xmaayy wrote: post #453
hedora wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Look at NFTs. The empowerment pricnciples are being actively killed by millions of VC dollars. Opensea are nominally recording transactions on a blockchain - but none of the actual meat. Everything 'real' lives inside their centralised system.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#565

Post by buster »

fortran77 wrote: post #519
hedora wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> From what I can tell, the underlying issue is that everything is spaghetti code written in a dynamically typed language. We need to re-write this in Rust before there can be universal acceptance!

As much as I like rust and think this would help increase acceptance for many tech affine people, this issue was a bad design decision, which is even worse. I don't think I will touch anything crypto until I can trust that the system is designed well.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#566

Post by FDSGSG »

ddingus wrote: post #556
capableweb wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, there's about $3B worth of WETH issued and only about $1.1M worth of those have been lost due to mistakes like the OPs.

I think that people are so unlikely to fuck this up that such a check would be rather pointless.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#567

Post by GaylordTuring »

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?

It is possible. That's why you have Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, two different chains. The latter one is the unaltered chain, while Ethereum (which is the most popular that's everybody are using) has been forked in such a way that you're describing once after a large hack.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#568

Post by jollybean »

capableweb wrote: post #231
noduerme wrote: post #41

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…

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…

What % of the people that use IBAN, know that there is a checksum, know what a checksum even is, or how to apply it?

Thankfully we have banks to deal with that - and legal framework that can help us undo problems.

"But you can use an exchange with ETH!"

Like banks? Making such networks ostensibly not 'decentralized'?

The entire point of Crypto/Blockchain is that is decentralized and is accessible to everyone.

If it requires that we trust 'quasi-centralized nodes' like CoinBase (i.e. banks) then it mostly defeats the purpose. Just use a bank.

At absolute minimum, the purveyors of such tech should be providing 'off the shelf' free wallet software that solves all of these problems of magical knowledge.

All of these arguments are fading quickly and the people doing this are risking a lot of credibility.

We talk about people wasting their time on AdTech, but at least there is actually some value in AdTech. We are facing an entire generation of people doing 'NoTech'. Let's turn this into something useful.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#569

Post by jethro_tell »

jlokier wrote: post #391
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.

Low-cost insurance is an interesting idea that might actually work to smooth over some of the hard edges of "code is law". It ought to be possible to craft an insurance policy that would pay out the $500k (or equivalent WETH/ETH) in cases like the one in this article, where the transparency of the ledger clearly shows that the tokens are unrecoverable. As insurance companies are notorious for declining to pay out, th…

Lol, so like the FDIC but you have to sue to get your money.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#570

Post by triangleman »

radford-neal wrote: post #411
erikbye wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here's the "oh so complex" contract in question, all 60 lines. contract WETH9 { string public name = "Wrapped Ether"; string public symbol = "WETH"; uint8 public decimals = 18; event Approval(address indexed src, address indexed guy, uint wad); event Transfer(address indexed src, address indexed dst, uint wad); event Deposit(address indexed dst, uint wad); event Withdrawal(address indexed src, uint wad); mapping…

Why does anyone want to use this? Knowing nothing about it, this is the question that remains unanswered to me after reading through dozens of comments on this debacle. What was the person who lost half a million trying to accomplish? For what benefit? I assume that if you just want to use ETH to buy and sell stuff, you don't have to get involved with any of these smart contracts.

There's some detail on weth.io. apparently ETH is not Ethereum (ERC-20) compatible, if you can believe it.

I'm still kind of confused how ypu go from one ERC-20 chain to another. I know there's wrapped Ether on other chains but I'm not clear on how it got there or whether it's a good idea to hold that. Seems like a "not my keys" situation in a way.

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