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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?

#321

Post by axiosgunnar »

capableweb wrote: post #294
sshine wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or like sticking the wrong plastic card into an ATM and observe the machine eat the card... and your bank account. You'd expect that invalid actions lead to idempotent errors, not glitch states where you lose everything.

> 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.

Nobody is worried about sending funds to „foobar“. People are worried about sending funds to a syntactically valid address that no one has access to.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#322

Post by oefrha »

capableweb wrote: post #301
oefrha wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people setting up mailservers don’t consider a catch-all forwarding to /dev/null a valid inbox. And no sane mailserver software forwards to /dev/null by default if you don’t explicitly tell it what to do when it receives email it isn’t supposed to receive. A “valid” address locking up funds sent to it without recourse is /dev/null.

Hm, in order to clear up some (seemingly) confusion about how things work, let me offer you this explanation: The user in the submission did not send funds to a invalid address. The address is valid, as otherwise funds wouldn't be able to be sent to it (the wallet would not allow you, nor the protocol, nor the miner/validators). The address happens to belong to a contract, that can also hold funds, similarly to accou…

I’ve made myself abundantly clear that WETH or whatever smart contract shouldn’t blackhole money by default when there’s no handler code, just like mailserver software shouldn’t blackhole emails by default. This is not a case of John making a mistake of forgetting their password, it’s ridiculous fallback behavior with unconsidered edge cases (or maybe considered but intentionally unhandled due to stupidly expensive compute). The design is atrocious and apparently it’s the default for all smart contracts.

The stakes are a little bit higher when you’re sending money instead of emails.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#323

Post by axiosgunnar »

sshine wrote: post #275
zo1 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Some people are super careful, like myself, when transferring money between personal (normal bank) accounts I always test with a small amount. Even if the bigger amount is like $200. And that's after triple checking the account number before clicking transfer. I can't imagine what I'd be doing with these exotic crypto accounts and smart contracts.

When I do money transfers on bank accounts, I read the 10 digits 4-5 times. If the person that I'm transfering to is in the room, I ask them to read aloud their account number as I follow. The fact that you have to get 10 digits right and that a typo can result in sending the money off somewhere unknown, disturbs me a lot. It's amazing how cryptocurrencies mimicked that part about existing digital money to perfection…

Account numbers have checksums.

An „off by one“ typo cannot occur.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#324

Post by derbOac »

capableweb wrote: post #293
kuhewa wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currencies don't come with a prerequisite of intimate knowledge of industrial jargon that requires use on a daily basis to be proficient enough in to not lose everything.

If you're gonna deal directly with the forex industry without any safe-guards there will definitely be a bunch of jargon around, have you ever dealt with the insides of forex trading before? In general, giving someone money does not require intimate knowledge of what's happening behind the scenes, that's true. But the submission is not about a normal transfer, the user is explicitly avoiding the safe-guards in place,…

This kind of argument came to mind when I first read the thread, but then I thought... isn't the whole point of crypto to be decentralized? To avoid these kinds of concentrated power structures?

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#325

Post by capableweb »

axiosgunnar wrote: post #321
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.

Nobody is worried about sending funds to „foobar“. People are worried about sending funds to a syntactically valid address that no one has access to.

This is impossible to solve, in the cryptocurrency space or in the existing structures we have. When you send an email, you cannot know if someone actually has access to that account (maybe they forgot their password?), you can only know if the address is valid or not (by sending the email). Similarly, you don't know if the right person has access to the bank account you're sending funds to, unless you ask the person who is supposed to have access, if they actually can access it.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#326

Post by darkhorn »

spuz wrote: post #134
ddoice wrote: post #8

I lost 4.5K transfering USDT from Binance to Coinbase From time to time I check if the money is still there. The last time I asked Coinbase support they didn't even bother to answer me. I was not investing, one of my contractors unilaterally decided to pay me in crypto.

How was the USDT lost?

I am not sure but he may not have entered provided MEMO other than the wallet address.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#327

Post by sanderjd »

noduerme wrote: post #41
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…

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…

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 and then reading something about web applications and saying "I was involved in applications and none of this makes sense to me". That's because it's a different domain, with some similarities but many differences.

Edit: Changed "crypto" to "cryptocurrency" to differentiate from a different general problem with how the shorthand already had a different meaning.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#328

Post by PretzelPirate »

danjac wrote: post #157
iqanq wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are expecting to understand how a completely new and complex technology works from 5 lines of text. Imagine if someone tried to explain Kubernetes to you in 5 lines of text.

Sure, but celebrities and grifters aren't pushing the general public to adopt Kubernetes or bet their life savings on their understanding of it.

There certainly is a different group who pushes Kubernetes as the savior of DevOps. I’ve seen this put plenty of pressure on teams to adopt it and they’ve gone in too fast, resulting in downtime, security issues, and huge operational costs. These are real costs and can have an affect on someone’s home life and career prospects within their company. I’ve had to go in and save quite a few of these people, and they were pretty miserable.

We shouldn’t shill any technology, and anytime we do talk about it’s virtues we should discuss its shortcomings and why people should be hesitant to use it.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#329

Post by sanderjd »

afidrya wrote: post #60
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…

In simple words, he should have called a smart contract's function which would withdraw his tokens and send real ETH to his address. Instead, he sent tokens to smart contract's address and they will stay there forever, not associated with any account. This complexity should be abstracted away by wallet's UI. Users don't have to call APIs directly. Also, this whole situation could be prevented by trying to send a smal…

It was a really bad design decision to have smart contracts have this "send to the address" capability, rather than requiring clients call a method that is explicitly defined.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#330

Post by dylkil »

StringyBob wrote: post #66

Having watched cryptocurrency from a distance via HN etc. for over a decade, I thought I had a general understanding, but this made me realize I wasn’t aware of what smart contracts really were (just looked up solidity today and details of The DAO hack). The potential for irreversible losses, fraud and security holes are much bigger than I realized. This also lead me to this video which will now be my ‘go to’ recomme…

your whole comment reads like an ad for that video
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