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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?

#691
post #614
post #561

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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 so…

Yes, it really is pretty standard and straight forward. The ONLY problem is that its popularity has skyrocketed so there are A LOT of people talking about it who have no technical understanding. Parent comment above is a perfect example, complaining because in 10 years the tech has evolved.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#692
post #427

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…

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.

How can you be so naive about this topic yet confident enough to add your 2 cents? There are been test nets from day one and running one yourself is trivial.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#693
post #453

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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.

A LOT of people are doing it wrong but there are still good projects out there. The two that come to mind are Monero and Bitcoin Cash. Both still work as designed and have low fees and/or instant and/or anonymous transactions.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#694
post #271

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WTF is an actual real token of ETH chain, https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/wtf-token with a market cap of $1.3 million. https://protos.com/crypto-airdrop-tries-cover-ethereum-gas-f... Did you know about the token beforehand and made a sarcastic post on it, or was it just a pure coincidence.

Pure coincidence. I had written "wtf" in response to something else and it just sounded like a good coin name for a joke. I don't follow the latest in shitcoins. Not that I'm exactly surprised there's a token called WTF...

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Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#695

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…

I think this is a problem with crypto that will forever prevent it from becoming mainstream. The average person understands the concept of money but understanding smart contracts is out of scope for a large part of the general population m

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Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#696
post #608

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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…

Sidebar:

How come such a check is so damn expensive?

It should not be.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#697
post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The financial system cannot run on blockchain technology, even if the technology worked well. This is because "decentralisation" requires blockchain assets to be "unconfiscable", but financing is only feasible if the assets are "confiscable" (otherwise the borrower can walk away with the money and suffer no consequences).

That doesn't seem to make sense. Don't people usually borrow money to spend it (for example to buy a house or finance their startup)? So in most cases the borrowed money is also gone and at most you can confiscate the collateral (for example the house). That is still possible with crypto.

In decentralised finance the legal system, which in conventional finance has the power to seize the borrower's assets in the event of default, is replaced with "dumb contracts", but dumb contracts don't have such a power. Financing is basically impossible with decentralised finance.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#698
post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It does good when your bank accounts get shut down, as happened to Wikileaks for example.

That's a super niche application, not a mass market use.

And yes, I know about the supposed use for people in countries with unstable regimes but I'm not convinced at the moment. Plus that use case, being that of people generally having low disposable incomes (barring China) absolutely doesn't justify the market value of crypto at the moment.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#699
post #546

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But people run production servers on their PCs all the time.

The set of people running a service with a revenue of 500k on a personal device must be minuscule and the people doing it almost certainly know it’s stupid. This is qualitatively different from crypto that allows you to burn your money on accident, while the people who build the infrastructure for this tell you is a smart, safe place to put your money.

If you wire money to a Nigerian prince, it's gone too. Doesn't mean a bank is not a safe place where to put your money.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#700
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.

Bitcoin has been working pretty well for years now.

Working well for what? It's useless as currency.
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