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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?

#611

Post by SantalBlush »

capableweb wrote: post #431
hootbootscoot wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

an immutable black hole might as well be a shredder. the OP in the reddit did precisely that. that money is GONE. locked away forever. it has not been transferred to anyone else.

Indeed, an "immutable black hole" could be described as a shredder, agree. But that's not what that address is. The semi-official "black hole" address for Ethereum is 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 ( https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000000000000000000000000... ), currently has $29,461,295.02 worth of ETH in it. Any other (valid) address is just another address on the network.

"It's not a black hole, because black holes are collapsed stars, which is clearly not what we're talking about."

This is basically the style of argumentation being used here. Frequent equivocation over the terms "valid" and "black hole" to avoid addressing anyone's actual point.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#612

Post by UncleMeat »

capableweb wrote: post #517
mox1 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

exactly, with no-do overs. Everyone hand codes their assembly correctly on the first try right!?!!

There are plenty of do-overs, it's called the "development phase" and involves testing things on your local computer with the team. No one gets everything right the first time, but with a lot of testing, you can actually write software that does exactly what you think it will do, and you can achieve pretty cool stuff. Remember that humans wrote the software that took humanity to the moon!

As we know, no software has had bugs caught once launched to prod. The existence of some software that worked under this model is not evidence that it is a good model. "Just test prior to release" is not a complete solution.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#613

Post by shadowgovt »

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.

Should this mess endure, people will just keep using dollars and other fiat currencies.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#614

Post by dpark »

FDSGSG wrote: post #561
johnchristopher wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it really? From what I can tell these are all Etherium-specific terms. This is not standardized. It might be consistent but that’s not at all the same as actually being standardized.

This seems like saying that Chef terminology is standard. It might be internally consistent with its talk of recipes and ingredients and whatnot for imaging machines. But this terminology is not standard because it’s meaningless to someone who had experience with a different imaging platform.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#615

Post by xzjis »

yoavm wrote: post #47
westcoast330 wrote: post #38

The future of currency ladies and gentlemen. This money is literally gone. Unrecoverable. Like he took the money out to a barrel and burned it. Only he didn't get any warmth out of it in exchange.

Considering the emissions of all proof-of-work-based Blockchains, he probably warmed all of us.

Since I'm mining ETH when I'm not gaming, he maybe warmed me.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#616

Post by shadowgovt »

RedShift1 wrote: post #482
noduerme wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as Ethereum is concerned it's valid, but the contract API is riding on top of Ethereum's blockchain. It's middleware. It's responsible for enforcing the contract. How does it have a giant black hole in it?

It's the same as you and I agreeing on a contract where it says when you send me money, I will burn it. If you then use a bank transfer to me, it's not the bank's fault your money is gone, we agreed on that contract and it's not the bank's business to deal with that. Doesn't mean that there shouldn't be safeguards, there absolutely should be, but just laying out where the responsibilities start and stop and the whole…

> it's not the bank's fault your money is gone, we agreed on that contract and it's not the bank's business to deal with that.

There's a reason some contracts (in the regular legal world) are illegal.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#617

Post by ddingus »

FDSGSG wrote: post #608
ddingus wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 NAS…

"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. "

This is also how high toxicity systems get made.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#618

Post by tirpen »

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…

And yet, disputing charges via your bank and issuing chargebacks via VISA/Mastercard are things that definitely exist and work perfectly fine. And as long as there is no equivalent function in crypto, it won't be suitable as a currency for general use.

And no amount of mocking faux laughter will change that.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#619

Post by shadowgovt »

GaylordTuring wrote: post #567
triangleman wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Specifically, it forked because even though the system is specifically designed to make rewriting history impossible, the hackers screwed so many users that they decided to undo it by ignoring history and starting from before the hack.

... Lest anyone ever think Blockchain tech is somehow immune to network effects and social considerations.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#620

Post by Tenoke »

sanderjd wrote: post #341
0x64 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Destroying ETH is indeed widely considered a good thing. Since the middle of last year, a portion of the fees for every transaction is burned and most ethereum people seem very pleased by this. I've lost track but for a long time last year, ETH was indeed deflationary. The sense is that the value of burned ETH is distributed to everyone on the network in proportion to how much ETH they have. I don't think it seems so…

Eth is currently still inflationary overall, more is minted than burned in the majority of blocks.
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