Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Did I just lose half a million dollars?

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 837 posts

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#571

Post by magicjosh »

capableweb wrote: post #479
SantalBlush wrote: post #458

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…

Your analogies make sense to me. Sounds a lot like running a system on Linux. Or maybe assembly is a better metaphor. I like the analogy about avoiding all the safety mechanisms on an electric line and jamming your hand in there...the grid can't tell the difference.

The arguments here are odd. The blockchain isn't built to handle this kind of operation by a non-expert user. Yes, mistakes are expensive. Is that okay? In the same way that a nuclear power plant isn't designed for a rando to go in and operate it.

Yes, raw blockchain stuff is hard and non-experts should not interact directly.

The key question is, is the payoff worth building an entire system around? For nuclear power, yes, because it provides electricity for people to just plug into. For blockchain, maybe, maybe not.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#572

Post by skinnymuch »

ljm wrote: post #339
XorNot wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really can't think of an expression other then "lol" to sum up my response here for just how incredibly stupid this is, as a "platform of the future". A design which actively discourages robust programming and error handling in financial software. Wow .

It's like a libertarian utopia. Literally everything is an individual responsibility with no wider recourse. Want validation? Other people don't want to pay for stuff they're not validating... so it's on you to be careful. Accidentally fuck up? Not our problem, that's on you for not calling the right API. Want your money back? We're not paying money to cover for other people's mistakes. You're on your own bud.

What about the Eth DAO forks? How was that individual responsibility?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#573

Post by triangleman »

oblio wrote: post #512
kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to some workshops when Ethereum was developed (sadly I decided against investing in the ICO because some aspects didn't convince me or I didn't understand them well enough). Even back then the discussion was that they were trying to do too much and it would be difficult to make it work reliably. Bitcoin deliberately chose a more conservative approach. Bitcoin also actually has a scripting language and allows f…

Domains where the basics are still being actively researched should never be part of the backbone of human society, though. Maybe they'll find solutions. Cool, let them put those solutions in practice in 2040 when all the bugs have been worked out.

Frankly that is the best case scenario for crypto. It's similar to the dot com bubble in 1999 actually, it's 20 years later and the internet is finally somewhat useful and intergrated into our lives. Originally it was just a bubble inflated with ad revenue inflated with investor money

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#574

Post by tartoran »

This whole thing is so complicated, I admit I don’t understand how 99% of these things work but, even if one has a good understanding, wouldn’t it be a good idea to run some dry runs with symbolic sums before going on with the whole sum? Even better, chunk it out in a few transactions, wait for each transaction to complete before proceeding further?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#575

Post by capableweb »

jollybean wrote: post #568
capableweb wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

I think you missed that the user went beyond just using something to swap ETH for WETH and instead interacted directly (manually) with the contract, effectively bypassing the safe-guards that are already in place (even without exchanges) to prevent issues.

The user basically guessed that this is how you turn ETH into WETH and vice-versa, without actually reading anything about it.

If the user searched for "How do I turn ETH into WETH?" and read the first few links, they would have avoided this problem. If they made a mistake of entering an invalid address in a wallet for a transfer, the wallet wouldn't allow the transfer in the first place.

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

Yes, indeed. That also implies that you're responsible enough to have a basic understanding of what you're doing. Or at least recognize that you don't have a basic understanding, and seek to attain one when needed.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#576

Post by GaylordTuring »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #414
capableweb wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So your definition for "valid action" is just that the eth network lets them do it? Yes, this is indeed the definition for "valid", that the protocol allows them to do it. It was a valid action, but not the action the user actually wanted to perform. There are two ways of avoiding these scenarios: A) use UIs and don't interact with the protocol without safeguards, as the UI will prevent you from making mistakes (th…

"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.

"It's an action noone ever has ever wanted or ever will want to perform."

That's not entirely true. Just look at one of the many burn addresses that people willingly send money to all the time, for example: https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000000000000000000000000...

For example, some holder (maybe a founder) of a certain coin can burn a certain amount of their tokens, making it more rare. This is a quite common practice. If I were to burn a certain amount of tokens, I think the most natural thing to use as a burn address would be the contract address itself.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#578

Post by vitaflo »

0x64 wrote: post #265
brodo wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to waste energy to create ETH because ‘inflation baaad‘ but destroying ETH is possible by accident. Crypto bros should really take some macroeconomics courses.

If inflation was bad, would destroying ETH not be a good thing since it leads to what's effectively an instant deflation of supply?

Deflation of actual currency is worse as it promotes hoarding. If something becomes cheaper tomorrow than today (deflation) then I am incentivized to not spend my currency. This grinds the gears of economic activity. Of course this only matters if you expect cryptocurrency to act like a currency.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#579

Post by zepto »

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…

The idea that people need to treat financial transactions in crypto as if they were writing software for a moon mission shows how impractical the entire space is.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#580

Post by trizuz »

tluyben2 wrote: post #75
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…

But why wouldn't the contract decline this kind of 'invalid' transaction? It is invalid as it is now stuck over there forever, meaning it's a case that should be rejected.

No post body was provided.
Post reply on HN