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A Crypto User Sent $50k to a Smart Contract. It's Gone Forever

decrypt.co

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Re: A Crypto User Sent $50k to a Smart Contract. It's Gone Forever

#31

Post by h_anna_h »

dheera wrote: post #13
captn3m0 wrote: post #9

I'm never trusting software for two things: 1. Voting 2. Irreversible transactions

I suppose I'll be downvoted for this but my unpopular opinion is that I feel like the voting problem is solvable with some combination of decentralized and cryptographic tech. It's just that the people who can solve it don't want to solve it.

Many people have tried to solve it in the past and all of the attempts ended in failure. It appears that it is non-trivial to have both secret voting and at the same time make it possible for the voters to prove that the election was not rigged.

Re: A Crypto User Sent $50k to a Smart Contract. It's Gone Forever

#33

Post by sebmellen »

pwdisswordfish0 wrote: post #25
woodruffw wrote: post #8

It's not 50k (more like $50), but I have a similar story with Stellar. I was one of the (thousands of?) people who Keybase/Stellar/mysterious parties decided to gift some of their tokens to. I tried to transfer them to a provider with my bank information, and immediately flushed them into /dev/null because I didn't understand the separate sequences of numbers that I was supposed to provide. I wasn't exactly upset, bu…

That's a different situation. Those Stellar tokens didn't go into /dev/null. They went into the hands of Coinbase, they're just not crediting you. It's not that they can't do anything about it, they just aren't.

Correct. To be specific, instead of providing a unique address per deposit, Coinbase instead provides one address, and identifies individual deposits to that address using a Stellar "memo." The same issue is present with Ripple.

This isn't a problem with Stellar itself, but more how Coinbase decides to approach the issue. But Stellar does require a 0.5 XLM commitment to "open" an account on-chain, which is probably what holds Coinbase back.

Otherwise, Stellar is a very reliable and focused chain, and has a stable fee market (which means a lot these days!).

Re: A Crypto User Sent $50k to a Smart Contract. It's Gone Forever

#34

Post by sebmellen »

war1025 wrote: post #15
dheera wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose I'll be downvoted for this but my unpopular opinion is that I feel like the voting problem is solvable with some combination of decentralized and cryptographic tech. It's just that the people who can solve it don't want to solve it.

The thing about voting is that for the public to trust voting, it needs to be something a general member of the public can understand. That is why paper balloting is such a durable voting mechanism. Pretty well anyone can understand how you would take a stack of paper ballots and decide who got the most votes. From there you just need to maintain a chain of custody where all ballots are monitored by any interested pa…

I understand the argument here, but to play devil's advocate...

In the 2020 presidential election, tens of millions of people had trouble understanding how paper ballots worked. I'm not sure the argument about public trust is that durable or cogent at this point.

Re: A Crypto User Sent $50k to a Smart Contract. It's Gone Forever

#35

Post by cheschire »

tdons wrote: post #26
birdperson77 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it is solvable. Voting has to satisfy two requirements: 1) Votes must be private and anonymous (i.e. not linked to your identity) 2) Voting must be secure It's easy to satisfy either one of these requirements, but currently impossible to satisfy both.

Define 'secure'?

Seems fairly obvious and self explanatory to me.

A secure vote is one that has a result that cannot be altered once it has been cast.

Re: A Crypto User Sent $50k to a Smart Contract. It's Gone Forever

#37

Post by chrisco255 »

olliej wrote: post #19
captn3m0 wrote: post #9

I'm never trusting software for two things: 1. Voting 2. Irreversible transactions

(2) the transactions are irreversible, and the software is clearly doing that well. The problem is people don't actually want irreversible transactions, they've just been told that they do.

Yes, they do. That is a feature, not a bug. It gives digital transactions the same properties as cash. When you hand over $50K in cash to someone, you better make sure you trust that someone. When you send $50K in crypto to an address, you better make sure you trust that address. People have to learn new habits and precautions with crypto. With great power comes great responsibility.

Maybe the UI for wallets should do more to defend against erroneous sends, or warn the user to make a test transaction before sending large amounts? A lot more can be done with UX.

Re: A Crypto User Sent $50k to a Smart Contract. It's Gone Forever

#38

Post by chrisco255 »

war1025 wrote: post #15
dheera wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose I'll be downvoted for this but my unpopular opinion is that I feel like the voting problem is solvable with some combination of decentralized and cryptographic tech. It's just that the people who can solve it don't want to solve it.

The thing about voting is that for the public to trust voting, it needs to be something a general member of the public can understand. That is why paper balloting is such a durable voting mechanism. Pretty well anyone can understand how you would take a stack of paper ballots and decide who got the most votes. From there you just need to maintain a chain of custody where all ballots are monitored by any interested pa…

I think paper + blockchain. Paper ballot with anti-counterfeit tech (maybe fingerprint requirement as well for uniqueness check), scanned with an image recorded on blockchain (or hash of image stored on chain), then I think ballot images should be publicly viewable (with personal info redacted) so anyone can audit.

Re: A Crypto User Sent $50k to a Smart Contract. It's Gone Forever

#39

Post by jtchang »

chrisco255 wrote: post #37
olliej wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(2) the transactions are irreversible, and the software is clearly doing that well. The problem is people don't actually want irreversible transactions, they've just been told that they do.

Yes, they do. That is a feature, not a bug. It gives digital transactions the same properties as cash. When you hand over $50K in cash to someone, you better make sure you trust that someone. When you send $50K in crypto to an address, you better make sure you trust that address. People have to learn new habits and precautions with crypto. With great power comes great responsibility. Maybe the UI for wallets should d…

When you hand someone cash you can get the cash back. You know the person you can chase them down.

Re: A Crypto User Sent $50k to a Smart Contract. It's Gone Forever

#40

Post by [deleted] »

woodruffw wrote: post #8

It's not 50k (more like $50), but I have a similar story with Stellar. I was one of the (thousands of?) people who Keybase/Stellar/mysterious parties decided to gift some of their tokens to. I tried to transfer them to a provider with my bank information, and immediately flushed them into /dev/null because I didn't understand the separate sequences of numbers that I was supposed to provide. I wasn't exactly upset, bu…

[deleted]
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