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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?

#661

Post by vmception »

srcreigh wrote: post #658
capableweb wrote: post #228

Since no one seems to think about how this could have prevented, here is a simple way, which I've applied to lots of things in life, not just cryptocurrency transfers: - If you're making a transfer somewhere with a large amount, do a small transfer first and verify it's working. Confirm at the receiving end before moving big sums. - If you're calling a contract, try it with a small amount first. Verify the parameters…

Sounds great. I'm sure there's checks in place to ensure the smart contract can't have different logic for small amounts and large amounts. Right?

There are many ways to check that, yes.

But the best way is to use a trusted contract.

The other ways are pretty absurd burdens to put on a user.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#662

Post by vmception »

xmaayy wrote: post #459
NelsonMinar wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simpler way: use real financial instruments. Traditional financial systems have had solutions for errors like this for centuries.

Reading the reddit thread; it seems like this individual was an OG miner and just held ETH for many years. His previous time investment matured, and he decided to finally cash out.

lol cash out by probably trying to hide it from exchanges and then pwned themselves in the process.

exchanges would take ETH without wrapping it

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#663

Post by vmception »

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.

thats pretty funny but for anyone else that wants to learn about this stuff, proof of work blockchains use the same energy whether transactions occur or not

ironically this seemingly would actually bolster the argument against Proof of Work, but its probably more convenient that people are easily swayed towards inaccurate arguments

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#664

Post by SilasX »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #649
u-rate wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn‘t that exactly like the status quo with banks?

Bank transactions are mutable/reversible by design and by law. It's quite the opposite from banks.

Really? Access to the legal system doesn’t vary based on how pleb you are?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#665

Post by vmception »

faizshah wrote: post #81
sp332 wrote: post #3

> You are now the 265th person to do this but you contributed 45% of all the WETH in the contract.

I feel like this should be the takeaway. Instead of blaming users there should be some system that allows patches, updates and new features to be published to these smart contracts. It just seems silly that any programmer would think it’s a good idea to publish some code you can’t patch and horrifying to let that code scale to this size without being able to correct any of your original assumptions.

There are a couple design patterns for this

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#666

Post by user-the-name »

rosndo wrote: post #96
dividuum wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad example. IBAN ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Bank_Account_Num... ) for example has a two digit checksum that prevents this and similar simple typos.

How is it a bad example? Not everyone uses IBANs. And besides, big banks still have to deal with checksum-passing iban typos on a daily basis. IBANs only have two check digits.

> And besides, big banks still have to deal with checksum-passing iban typos on a daily basis.

That's the thing - they can deal with it. There are fallbacks.

In crypto, your money is just instantly destroyed.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#667

Post by vmception »

jb3689 wrote: post #518
fredsmith42 wrote: post #444

I don't know anything about crypto. Why can't he contact someone on the receiving end of the transaction and say "I really messed up, please transfer this money back to me?". I know crypto transactions can't be undone, but a new transaction of equal value in the reverse direction could be done, right? And if not, why the hell not?

It is truly mind-boggling to me that funds can just effectively vanish in the system with no sense of recourse. And that no one thought this could go awry

Funds being inaccessible contribute to the scarcity of everyone else’s funds

Just don't let it happen to you

Thats the game! People like it, it goes awry upwards!

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#668

Post by sanderjd »

adjkant wrote: post #641
floatingatoll wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would gain trust for returning all of the WETH accumulated in all of the contracts where it’s been idled due to PEBCAK, in concert with a code fork that refuses to accept such transactions. That would be a sign of maturity and intelligence to bankers, and influence their consideration of whether Ethereum might be a viable platform for their financial business someday.

This idea would be antithetical to decentralization of cryptocurrency, but I think that since this issue is a platform level problem (e.g. future contracts can also introduce this) what is needed is a set of mediators/arbitrators (we can call them "judges" that hear these cases and have a technical mechanism to correct them without a fork. In order to select these judges, the community can elect them directly or elec…

Some other blockchains do actually have "governance" somewhat along the lines of what you've described here.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#669

Post by user-the-name »

voidfunc wrote: post #426

Ouch hard lesson to learn. I burned some ETH earlier this year trying to buy SHIB for shits and giggles. This is a problem that needs to be figured out before crypto can go mainstream.

The lesson being "crypto is insane garbage that nobody should touch with a ten-foot pole".

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#670

Post by vmception »

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…

Thank you! Finally a code discussion here instead of all this pearl clutching hysteria.

So, this is all about the ‘payable’ method, which means it is triggered by the native asset of the virtual machine.

If you look closely you’ll see there is a default anonymous function with ‘payable’ accessor method which calls the deposit() method

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