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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?

#761

Post by tata71 »

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.

> Ignoring that, it's nuts that the best practice is "send a little money, and see if it works".

This passes the "does it sound like email?, it might be decentralized!" smell test, anyway.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#762

Post by drdeca »

saboot wrote: post #160
doteka wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It abstracts away underlying hardware, leaving you with a convenient set of abstractions for deploying containerized networked services. Sort of an OS for a cluster of distributed machines. Unfortunately this involves lots of YAML. How’d I do?

Except for the very last part because I don't know what YAML is, but the rest was understandable. Which I think drives the point of all this crypto talk in acronyms contributes to it being incomprehensible.

YAML stands for “YAML Ain’t Markup Language”, (originally “Yet Another Markup Language”).

It it a way of storing the same kind of thing that JSON can store.

Though, unlike JSON, it supports comments, uses a python-like significant indentation, and has a few uh, things not in quotes sometimes being taken as strings, but if it is `NO` then instead, if there are no quotes, it will be interpreted as the constant false .

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#763

Post by SilasX »

topranks wrote: post #737
SilasX wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

You have a different definition of easy than I do! You have to figure out which of those your client was using at the time, and then how to convert it into a currently functional client’s private key format. Most people need to hire a specialist to figure that out.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#764

Post by TimJRobinson »

zkldi wrote: post #316
capableweb wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'd expect that invalid actions lead to idempotent errors, not glitch states where you lose everything. Indeed, and that's exactly how most cryptocurrencies work today. You try to send funds to an invalid address, the wallet will present you with an error that you cannot do that. The user in the submission did not perform an invalid action, because they wouldn't be able to perform an invalid action.

So your definition for "valid action" is just that the eth network lets them do it? They clearly didn't want to burn £500k, and that is now irrecoverable, alongside 260 other people who made the same mistake, on a smart contract that forgoes validation for gas fees. How is this not invalid?

`rm -rf /` is a perfectly valid action, but lots of people still get burnt accidentally running it.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#765

Post by derivagral »

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.

https://ethereum.org/en/developers/local-environment/

several of these projects will set up a local chain with presets to test exactly this. probably worth doing before sending large amounts to random contracts.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#766

Post by ddtaylor »

root_axis wrote: post #672
disruptalot wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something happening once does not mean it will happen again. There have been numerous huge hacks in the past 5 years, even where the losses were from the most influential of holders and no action was taken (e.g. parity bugs). A bug and reversal occurred in the first few years of Bitcoin's existence that has effectively meant that Bitcoin won't reach the stated 21m coins exactly. It's guaranteed at this point that the…

The point is that it can happen if enough influential individuals in the eth community want it to happen, it is a social software not "immutable", and this will be further enshrined if PoS ever becomes a reality. Bitcoin has the same problem, and cryptocoin enthusiasts are fooling themselves if they think that miners won't raise the 21m cap when the end of Bitcoin rewards start looming.

> 21m cap when the end of Bitcoin rewards start looming.

This has actually already happened with Monero. The mining reward schedule was much more aggressive in it's diminishing returns. Once the mining returns cross a threshold of not being able to sustain the cost of mining things dried up very quickly. Devs jumped in and added Tail Emission [1] so that all blocks have a fixed reward of 0.6 XMR that will never change or go away.

[1]: https://www.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/tail-emissio...

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#767

Post by quickthrower2 »

vmception wrote: post #662
xmaayy wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

to get real fiat/cash (not tether) you need an exchange, or meet someone on the street I guess (but you might get held up or something that way).

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#768

Post by SamReidHughes »

jethro_tell wrote: post #496
robbiepapiere wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn‘t send it to a printer (and certainly not generate the passphrase on a computer that is connected to the internet). Write by hand, it is only 12 to 24 words.

You can get a printer without a network port. You can skip the hardware wallet and print the whole key as a qr code or just text in an ocr font. Then there's no chance for hardware failure.

A copy could end up stored on the printer's hard drive. Figuring out whether you have a printer where that's possible is more work than writing it by hand.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#769

Post by YATA0 »

nikanj wrote: post #70
YATA0 wrote: post #54

Crypto Darwinism is a real thing. Insane to see that amount of money just disappear. Literally just poof , it's gone. Not "gone" like someone stole it, because that money didn't disappear, the thief has it now. This money literally went into a digital blackhole.

The price of eth is surprisingly easy to calculate, with the coin price being (new dollars people are willing to invest into crypto)/(amount of coins in circulation). There are no pesky externalities like "amount of EBITDA per outstanding eth", every single dollar is coming from someone buying in. This reduced the denominator, thus increasing the value of eth.

Is this a GPT-3 generated comment? Did you reply to the wrong thread?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#770

Post by jlokier »

jethro_tell wrote: post #569
jlokier wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low-cost insurance is an interesting idea that might actually work to smooth over some of the hard edges of "code is law". It ought to be possible to craft an insurance policy that would pay out the $500k (or equivalent WETH/ETH) in cases like the one in this article, where the transparency of the ledger clearly shows that the tokens are unrecoverable. As insurance companies are notorious for declining to pay out, th…

Lol, so like the FDIC but you have to sue to get your money.

Not really. Having the option of a lawsuit is just a backup; the possibility is what makes sure the insurer chooses to pay without one.

An insurer that knows when it doesn't have a case and will be forced to pay (plus costs) when there's clear evidence of coverage and loss will almost always pay without a fight.

However if there are high-value decisions which are not so clear cut, then having the option to go to court or some other mediation system to settle is quite useful. One of the critisms of "code is law" is the lack of mechanism for nuanced, human intervention when something unexpected happens due to a bug, design flaw or unexpected consequence that turns out to be unreasonable.

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