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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?

#601

Post by guiambros »

hnu0847 wrote: post #562
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.

> Where should one go to learn how all of these systems work?

Here's the path I'd suggest:

1) If you have no basic understanding of blockchains, read Satoshi's Bitcoin original paper, and Ethereum's Yellow paper.

2) Read about ERC-20 [1][2], to understand what "tokens" really are (TLDR: basically a hashtable stored in the ethereum blockchain, containing a mapping of balances to addresses, and the expectation that you must implement a standard API to be considered an ERC-20 token)

3) Learn about Solidity. The language is dead simple if you have any programming background (preferable C, but not too different than Rust/Python/Go), although it takes some time to wrap your head around the idea that the state is stored permanently in the blockchain. There's plenty of tutorials, but I found Ivan on Tech [3] to be excellent, and Moralis Academy [4] if you want something more structured (plus they offer many other courses in this area).

Solidity documentation [5] is also excellent. And Remix IDE [6] makes it really easy to experiment and run your "hello world" solidity programs in a simulated environment, without worrying about deploying to testnet, faucets, etc.

[1] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc...

[2] https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-erc20-and-what-does-i...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILw-7mplRlI&list=PLo0ddf4DBU...

[4] https://academy.moralis.io/

[5] https://docs.soliditylang.org/en/v0.8.11/

[6] https://remix.ethereum.org/

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#602

Post by oblio »

triangleman wrote: post #573
oblio wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, but the web was instantly useful for a huge array of legitimate uses.

It was never a solution in search of a problem.

In 1999 the tech wasn't there but everyone could see where it was going, like all investments, it was a matter of timing.

Crypto is still at the fundamental research phase and we don't even have consensus that it does more good than bad, yet.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#603

Post by zo1 »

ciupicri wrote: post #465
zo1 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't trust all banks to have such things in their account numbers. Especially in the tech age where they seem to think they're beyond physical keyboard typos and OCR errors.

What are you talking about? IBAN account numbers have not one, but two digit checksums.

I probably don't live in the same part of the world as you. IBAN account numbers are not common here at all.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#605

Post by marcosdumay »

dahart wrote: post #502
freemint wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He tested it by converting Euros to Dollars first, used it for a while and then put Dollars in to the same machine and they were shredded. He did test but using the wrong mental model.

Why do we have a machine that shreds any dollars? Who anywhere is interested in a dollar shredding feature?

That's the correct question.

The supporters here are saying "yeah, it shreds dollars, he should have known that". And yeah, if you have a machine that shreds dollars, you better know what it does. That's a good reason for not having such a machine.

Anyway, ETH seems to be full of those features where it shreds money on places that are really not obvious and sometimes gets every single person by surprise.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#606

Post by Adrox »

capableweb wrote: post #325
axiosgunnar wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is worried about sending funds to „foobar“. People are worried about sending funds to a syntactically valid address that no one has access to.

This is impossible to solve, in the cryptocurrency space or in the existing structures we have. When you send an email, you cannot know if someone actually has access to that account (maybe they forgot their password?), you can only know if the address is valid or not (by sending the email). Similarly, you don't know if the right person has access to the bank account you're sending funds to, unless you ask the person…

You can NEVER send a bank account transfer to a UNASSIGNED IBAN, the bank will just reject it after some days.

If you sent a IBAN transfer someone will get the money. You transfer to someone else that gets the money and you could try to go to court.

The money just doesn’t disappear like in crypto.

The e-mail is a great example, the e-mail can be lost, thats why no bank ever made transfer over email! You loose the e-mail text, not 500.000$!

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#607

Post by UncleMeat »

emteycz wrote: post #506
UncleMeat wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people are allowed to interact with smart contracts. To obtain the WETH he needed to do that. This is a "why do we even have that lever" kind of situation. If my brokerage had a "permanently burn all of your money" button then it wouldn't be reasonable to just say "well, people shouldn't push that button." We can even see this with the criticism of wire fraud. Wire fraud is a huge fucking mess that occasionally c…

People are allowed to login as root and delete their systems too. Yes, today's software doesn't make it easy - and the same can be said about this wallet/token; this was a complex sequence of steps in the wrong direction, not a missclick.

And a lot of ink is spilled about systems to make this very difficult, with people continuing to work to improve things. We didn't simply say "well, just don't type those characters" and move on with our lives.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#608

Post by FDSGSG »

ddingus wrote: post #597
FDSGSG wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Again NASA would disagree. Money matters a lot. Should this mess endure, people will forever be saying a little bit of gas would have been worth it. And we've people with six figure arguments as to why such a check makes sense. The idea of minimal code, focused on speed coupled with financials leads me FAR away from all this. I will watch with great interest and entertainment.

>Again NASA would disagree.

Yeah, because NASA has been utterly fucked by the congress. Because of politics it's better for NASA to spend 5x the money on 1 reliable spacecraft than to build 5 slightly less reliable spacecraft out of which only 1 fails.

Even if the economics of it don't make sense, NASA can't afford to be seen failing because because politicians will not want to fund them.

I guess my point is that NASA is an exceptionally badly managed entity, not something you'd want to aspire to. (Of course the people working at NASA are not the ones to blame for this.)

>Money matters a lot. Should this mess endure, people will forever be saying a little bit of gas would have been worth it.

That gas would probably add up to more money than has been lost here.

>And we've people with six figure arguments as to why such a check makes sense.

The gas fees of such a check would probably be higher than the losses averted, especially in the long run. And any "losses" are essentially distributed among all ETH holders anyway.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#609

Post by djrogers »

cecilpl2 wrote: post #449
sshine wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I do money transfers on bank accounts, I read the 10 digits 4-5 times. If the person that I'm transfering to is in the room, I ask them to read aloud their account number as I follow. The fact that you have to get 10 digits right and that a typo can result in sending the money off somewhere unknown, disturbs me a lot. It's amazing how cryptocurrencies mimicked that part about existing digital money to perfection…

In Canada we use email for person-to-person money transfers. I transfer money to my contacts by email address. They then get an email which informs them they have a pending transfer, and allows them to deposit it into their bank account. You can optionally register your email with the central system for autodeposit.

That’s available in most US banks as well, but direct account to account transfer via account number is also possible.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#610

Post by Adrox »

capableweb wrote: post #575
jollybean wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

It was not “manual”. It was using MetaMask, one of the most used wallets and most recomended one!

Its not like going to a shell and putting a random command. It was one of the most used GUIs for crypto!

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