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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?

#751

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

SilasX wrote: post #732
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I reckon that the wire transfer is one of those things where you get a ton of warnings from your bank that the transaction is normally not reversible, at least it is at my bank. I think it's unfortunate that there are any legitimate transactions that require wire transfers -- I definitely am not someone who endorses the status quo here.

I guess my take is that all crypto transactions have properties strictly worse than the worst type of bank transfer. In addition to being irreversible when you initiate them, they are also irreversible if someone fraudulently initiates them on your behalf. And there is no more secure option that you can use with crypto. There is to my knowledge nothing in the crypto space with security properties similar to an ACH transfer.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#752

Post by anthonygd »

kylebenzle wrote: post #692
hedora wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Realistically if you just want to try out someone else's contract in a safe environment, the existence of the test nets is entirely irrelevant.

The contract is going to be at a different address, all the accounts involved are entirely different, the state of the contract is different. Even proving a contract at one address is the same as the contract at another address is non-trivial.

Pretending the existence of a test net proves anything is a lot like pretending the availability of source for your OS, compiler and dependency stack proves something. Maybe possibly for a professional with unlimited time, but that's it.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#753

Post by drdeca »

shadowgovt wrote: post #619
GaylordTuring wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Technically, rather than ignoring history and starting from before the hack, they added a nonstandard transaction (not generally allowed) which reversed the effects of the hack. This did not revert other transactions that happened after the hack.

But, yes, blockchain stuff is fundamentally based on consensus about what the rules are, and people/organizations with more social influence can [...] .

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#754

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

tirpen wrote: post #618
dmitriid wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Crypto works like cash. If you lose cash, there is no one to dispute charges and issue chargeback.

BTW I never had success trying to chargeback VISA for services that were not delivered. Scammers do it without problem though.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#755

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

liminvorous wrote: post #317
noduerme wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On BTC, you could send things to the wrong address, yes. But you can't send the wrong type of currency or send it to a nonexistent address. In this case it seems like the contract has created the black hole (not the Ethereum blockchain itself), but that's even more absurd since someone ultimately should have control over everything that was put into the contract, regardless of the source.

Sending currency to non-existant addresses is how people encode arbitary data on the bitcoin blockchain, so definitely possible. Giving a person control over the funds allocated to their smart contract probably opens holes where they can steal the smart contract's money, though obviously creating software that handles money and can't be updated is its own kettle of fish.

Why would one need to send to non-existent address? Any transaction can include data, one can donate for example.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#756

Post by baobabKoodaa »

landemva wrote: post #717
Adrox wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was not “manual”. It was using MetaMask, one of the most used wallets and most recomended one! Its not like going to a shell and putting a random command. It was one of the most used GUIs for crypto!

MetaMask, and any wallet, lets the user sign transactions. Wallets can't know nor validate contract internals.

They could.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#757

Post by widjit »

bigtex88 wrote: post #468
hughrr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with crypto is despite your explanation, I have no idea what any of your post means. Not any of it.

Ok so the problem then seems to be with your understanding of the space, not with crypto itself. I don't go to a geneticist and go "the problem with genetics is I have no idea what any of it means".

Humans didn't design genetics, it's a chaotic and confusing system that evolved by chance.

If you are seriously comparing your monetary system to something that evolved by chance there is a problem with your monetary system.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#758

Post by quickthrower2 »

radford-neal wrote: post #749
quickthrower2 wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?)

Yeah, having done this myself, a use case might be:

1. Buy ETH

2. Convert to WETH

3. Swap for TOKEN

4. Hold TOKEN

5. Swap token back for WETH (hopefully made a profit there)

6. Convert WETH back for ETH

I did this using Metamask / Uniswap so it is all done for you. So I had no need to understand how the contract works. Also didn't have anywhere near $500k!

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#759

Post by baobabKoodaa »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #340
ddtaylor wrote: post #58

I love how everyone assumes that the ETH blockchain is immutable and there is nothing that can happen to undo any of this. Did everyone simply forget when the Dao had a contract bug and the ETH devs literally just rolled back the transaction?

It's so immutable that it can be and was forked at least once... It's immutable as long as it's convenient to a clique of people...

Ethereum has been hard forked multiple times. Bitcoin at least once, too.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#760

Post by tata71 »

throw0101a wrote: post #344
sanderjd wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a symptom of the general problem of calling everything "cryptocurrency", which anchors people on the mental model of Bitcoin. You were involved in "cryptocurrency" 2011 when everything was Bitcoin or essentially just a fork of Bitcoin and all of the stuff in the comment you replied to was a few years away from existing. I think it would be like writing "applications" in the early 90s in Visual Basic a…

> I think this is a symptom of the general problem of calling everything "crypto", which anchors people on the mental model of Bitcoin. Or those of us who immediately think of AES, RSA, and Diffie–Hellman. Anyone around tech in the 1990s may also remember: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

Many of the same teams in this round.
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