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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?

#741

Post by T0Bi »

dragonwriter wrote: post #631
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…

So it's super-bad UX where radically different interaction patterns are used for what are to the user similar kinds of interaction, creating a trap.

The thing is that there are enough frontends using this smart contract where you can simply chose 'WETH to ETH' and you'll get the right transaction. For whatever reason this person thought it'd be a great idea to interact with the smart contract directly. This is possible and fine if you either know what you're doing or read the smart contract beforehand.

This user unfortunately did neither.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#742

Post by ggm »

ciupicri wrote: post #252
ggm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many countries: try Google for "recover destroyed banknote" search.

Could you be more specific please? Cause you said based on photographs. Otherwise national banks usually ask for more than half of the note. At least in that's how they do it in Germany and Romania.

Your point is clearer to me now. No, you can't literally recover money simply because you have a photograph of it. There is a recovery path for damaged and destroyed money, highly dependent on the serial number (which is why 50% of the note is typically requested)

Here's the Australian rules after a significant bushfire. Partial re-imbursement for up to 80% loss of the face of the note.

https://au.sports.yahoo.com/bushfires-burnt-your-cash-heres-...

The point I was trying to make is that the actual value of the exchange is not only visible, its entirely visible. The specific value can be proved. If this was analogous in real world currency, Claim for loss would be possible.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#743

Post by dragonwriter »

ggm wrote: post #742
ciupicri wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you be more specific please? Cause you said based on photographs. Otherwise national banks usually ask for more than half of the note. At least in that's how they do it in Germany and Romania.

Your point is clearer to me now. No, you can't literally recover money simply because you have a photograph of it. There is a recovery path for damaged and destroyed money, highly dependent on the serial number (which is why 50% of the note is typically requested) Here's the Australian rules after a significant bushfire. Partial re-imbursement for up to 80% loss of the face of the note. https://au.sports.yahoo.com/bu…

> There is a recovery path for damaged and destroyed money, highly dependent on the serial number (which is why 50% of the note is typically requested)

No, >50% of the same bill or proof of destruction of the remainder is requested not because of serial number dependency (you can have that much without the serial number), but because with either of those, you can be sure that the same bill isn't replaced twice, or replaced but still usable.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#744

Post by icedistilled »

dylkil wrote: post #336
0x_rs wrote: post #145

I used crypto in the past, starting a decade ago, but absolutely cannot wrap my head around these new-age concepts such as smart contracts, dozen ETH flavors and whatnot. They seem blackboxes to me no matter how much I read about them. The fact you have to use a withdrawal function instead of the reverse operation used for the initial conversion seems a pretty severe design overlook since they're burned forever this…

If you dont know what you are doing you should never interact with a smart contract directly. People like the guy who lost 500k should be using the frontends which interact with the contracts properly. https://wrapeth.com/

it's like telling someone never to deal with physical cash or dollar bills, only use credit cards.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#745

Post by icedistilled »

chrisshroba wrote: post #455
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?

This is true if the recipient is a person, but in this case it is a "Smart contract" which means it has particular programmed behavior and cannot just be asked to do something for ethical reasons. If it is not programmed to return money, it can't return money, and if it is not programmed to be reprogrammable, then it can't be reprogrammed to help this person.

how "smart" is a contract that will delivers good to non-existent entities. How "smart" is a contract that is actually a piece of code that's riddled with footguns? Calling these things "smart" contracts was the joke of the century.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#746

Post by dragonwriter »

T0Bi wrote: post #741
dragonwriter wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's super-bad UX where radically different interaction patterns are used for what are to the user similar kinds of interaction, creating a trap.

The thing is that there are enough frontends using this smart contract where you can simply chose 'WETH to ETH' and you'll get the right transaction. For whatever reason this person thought it'd be a great idea to interact with the smart contract directly. This is possible and fine if you either know what you're doing or read the smart contract beforehand. This user unfortunately did neither.

> The thing is that there are enough frontends using this smart contract where you can simply chose 'WETH to ETH' and you'll get the right transaction. For whatever reason this person thought it'd be a great idea to interact with the smart contract directly.

Getting out of the supposed user-opacity of legalese to something that was safe and reasonable for a non-elite-priesthood users to understand, trust, and interact with directly without an intermediary was, I thought, the whole allure of smart contracts over using the old-fashioned dumb kind to manage transactions and business relations.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#747

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

hedora wrote: post #427
noduerme wrote: post #41

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.

The underlying issue is that everyone wants to make money. And the quickest way to make money in crypto is to create a new coin, token, smart contract, NFT, web3, whatever. Thus ever increasing complexity.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#748

Post by user-the-name »

rosndo wrote: post #681
user-the-name wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You’re mistaken, they usually can’t deal with it. They’ll ask the other bank if they’d like to return the money, and that bank will maybe ask the recipient if they’d like to return the money. The recipient doesn’t want to return the money? You’re SOL. You can go to court, but they can trivially evade civil action by transferring the money overseas.

Those are all things you can try, though. In crypto, again, the money just instantly disappears.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#749

Post by radford-neal »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #705
radford-neal wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does anyone want to use this? Knowing nothing about it, this is the question that remains unanswered to me after reading through dozens of comments on this debacle. What was the person who lost half a million trying to accomplish? For what benefit? I assume that if you just want to use ETH to buy and sell stuff, you don't have to get involved with any of these smart contracts.

> I assume that if you just want to use ETH to buy and sell stuff, you don't have to get involved with any of these smart contracts Correct. If you want to send someone money unconditionally, you can just send it without a smart contract. > What was the person who lost half a million trying to accomplish? Why/when to use WETH? From the beginning: Like Bitcoin, ETH is a crypto currency that has it's own token called E…

Thanks for the explanation. So presumably the person involved was intending ultimately to do something involving some market that uses WETH rather than ETH, and was unwisely testing how the system works with ETH worth half a million dollars rather than five dollars. (Or possibly they changed their minds about using WETH for some purpose, and so just wanted their ETH back?)

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#750

Post by rosndo »

user-the-name wrote: post #748
rosndo wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re mistaken, they usually can’t deal with it. They’ll ask the other bank if they’d like to return the money, and that bank will maybe ask the recipient if they’d like to return the money. The recipient doesn’t want to return the money? You’re SOL. You can go to court, but they can trivially evade civil action by transferring the money overseas.

Those are all things you can try, though. In crypto, again, the money just instantly disappears.

You could still appeal to the developers, it has been done successfully in the past.
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