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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?

#731
post #381

Here's an unrelated but related question: How do you store your wallet / private keys where you would be comfortable storing an amount of money that's important to you? It feels like a bunch of consumer grade options we have are kind of flaky: Flash drives are extremely undependable. I've had a few fail to read after sitting in a closet for a year. SSDs can supposedly have data loss pretty quickly if left unpowered (…

I work for a crypto company. This is actually a solved problem. The solution is to use multi-sig wallets - at least for amounts that would be missed. A company might have a "5 of 8" multi-sig. This means that to move money, five of the eight team member accounts with keys have to agree and sign off on each transaction. This is massively better than secret sharing - once a secret is put together, that secret then work…

What do you use in practice for multisig ?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#732
post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, what? I did. Banks didn’t do anything when I got defrauded by wire except tell me they can’t do anything.

If you initiated a wire to the wrong account, that's one thing. The banks will not reverse this sort of transaction, to my understanding. If someone else fraudulently initiated a wire from your account, then that's another thing. This type of transaction will be reversed. I'm not sure which situation you're talking about. ACH transactions are a whole other ballgame.

I’m talking about me wiring money to someone who was actually a scammer, same as AI said before.

If your response is “oh well you should have been more careful about that”, congratulations on endorsing the very same defense crypto enthusiasts were giving and validating that they’re not all that different.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#733
post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just because finance is decentralized doesn't mean the law doesn't still apply. I don't know where you get that idea from. Also not sure what you mean by "dumb contracts" - crypto contracts can contain code on top of text, whereas traditional contracts can only contain text. So obviously the crypto contracts are strictly superior.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#734
post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Inflation hits the masses, or in general money supply manipulation schemes. In the last few weeks, markets tanked just because the FEDs announced they plan to increase interest rates. Is that really how we want to go on?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#736
post #381

Here's an unrelated but related question: How do you store your wallet / private keys where you would be comfortable storing an amount of money that's important to you? It feels like a bunch of consumer grade options we have are kind of flaky: Flash drives are extremely undependable. I've had a few fail to read after sitting in a closet for a year. SSDs can supposedly have data loss pretty quickly if left unpowered (…

While “being your own bank”, aka keeping all your savings in a shoe box under the bed, is idiotic, you can simply write the seed phrases down in ink on paper. So you don’t necessarily need some digital storage to keep them.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#737
post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what stresses me out the most about crypto. The supposed gold standard is a hardware wallet and access is done via 12-word recovery phrase but even that is sketchy. If I'm not wrong all an attack has to do is get recovery phrase and load it into another hardware wallet if they don't have mine, this is functionality is there if the hardware wallet fails. If I've been doxxed and have several mil in crypto, thie…

Also, in ten years you won’t know what to do with the 12 words because the application was abandoned and when you try to install it you get some error messages from npm about certain dependencies being deprecated.

It’s fairly easy to derive the keys yourself, don’t expect any single piece of software going dead would cause a problem.

https://github.com/nilcons/crypto-key-derivation

Crypto currencies will be worth jack shit in 10 years in all likelihood though..

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#738

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.

Ether isn’t intended to be used as a monetary currency like a dollar (reasonable stable). Its purpose is to pay for EVM instructions which are priced in gas.

This is like saying because shoes happen to be worth money (sneakers/trainers) and because people happen to speculate on the price of shoes that the future of money is shoes.

Bitcoin claims to be currency, Ether (used to pay for execution fees on Ethereum) does not.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#739

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

Oh duh! Thanks for pointing that out, I forgot about that, and I really should have known better!

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#740

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…

are you sure the deposit function isnt automatically called?

It is, see the comment of vmception above.
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