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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?

#421

Post by rosndo »

distances wrote: post #185
posterboy wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have more than once typed ref-number into the amount field. Ofc a transmission of $9765775689758 won't succeed, but if it did, I'm told there's little to be done about it, finders keepers.

Where would it be non-reversible? At least in Europe you totally do not own money that is transferred to your bank account by mistake. You'll have to pay it all back. There have been court cases after people spent such windfalls, and yes, they are still in the hook for full returns.

If the recipient of the windfall is not honest, they can just move the money to another country.

You can go to court and get a judgement against someone with no assets to collect. In the end you’ll just have lost even more money.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#422

Post by ohgodplsno »

ljm wrote: post #363
ohgodplsno wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economically, KYC in the real world is a step backwards. Economically, laws made to restrict trading is a step backwards. There's still a damn good reason we do it, but the crypto grifters seem to only see the economical part of it for some reason.

In that sense, crypto to me is like a consultancy taking a complex, legacy codebase and saying it'll be easier to rewrite it from scratch. We see how that plays out all the time. Something shiny and new is produced but it completely fails to take into account why the original system was so complex. Given enough time, it becomes just as complex as the old system, if not more complex.

Satoshi is a pure ancap, the lack of regulations is a feature for them. Being able to be a grifter and scam people is a feature, not a bug to most of the cryptocurrency community.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#423

Post by lottin »

nickjj wrote: post #381

Here's an unrelated but related question: How do you store your wallet / private keys where you would be comfortable storing an amount of money that's important to you? It feels like a bunch of consumer grade options we have are kind of flaky: Flash drives are extremely undependable. I've had a few fail to read after sitting in a closet for a year. SSDs can supposedly have data loss pretty quickly if left unpowered (…

Welcome to 'being your own bank'.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#424

Post by parksy »

MrPatan wrote: post #295

Sure, the tech is not perfect. But it will get better over time, not worse. Soon there may be a "good version" of it that replaces a big chunk of anything financial and financializes another chunk of everything else. Or maybe not. I understand assigning a low probability to that event, but the upside is so big that it's still a bit weird to be just a hater and not make a lottery-ticket-sized investment. Or I guess th…

There's a huge swing against literally anything crypto-related at the moment. I feel a big part of it is that big gaming companies pricked their ears up on the idea of NFTs and being able to own a marketplace sipping the cream from billions of microtransactions in realtime. Serious gamers really, really don't like that idea, having already been screwed down by DLC's, Pre-ordering, buggy and unfinished games, "seasons", "surprise mechanics" (literally gambling for virtual items).

The general consensus has spun around to being that anything crypto is a scam, elaborate ponzi/pyramid scheme, etc, etc. Bored Apes is a bit silly, NFTs could technically be used for so much more but that would require the right platform, and legislative support (ie the backing of society) to have meaning.

I think the cat is out of the bag tech-wise. I think you're right that improvements will be made - blockchain / distributed ledger / whatever you want simply exists now, and I doubt it will ever stop existing. Ignoring the tidal wave of criticism it faces now, some valid, some not, it has inherent technological advantages in cases where trustless, distributed, peer to peer transactional events need to be rigidly catalogued and visible to all participants.

I also think most of these positive advancements that will change the fabric of society yada yada, will require the profit motive to be eliminated completely, where maintaining a blockchain becomes something done for ethical or moral reasons like folding@home rather than hoping to ride the next whale's massive pump. It's kinda sad how desparate we all are for riches, billions of us but the financial incentive is the best motivator we could come up with.

But I digress. Prepare to be shouted down over the next few months / years for saying anything positive about any blockchainish-tech, it's all pretty well tarred with the same brush as NFTs and dodgey doge market manipulation at this point. It'll calm down eventually. It is what it is. Probably a well deserved critique of a concept that is still at a point equivalent to computers in the 80s vs smartphones today.

Give it time. People will find a proper use for it.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#425

Post by lottin »

SwiftyBug wrote: post #100
BatteryMountain wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It truly is laughable. Ever heard of "Return to Sender" in case of invalid events/transactions?

YES. Weren't these supposed to be SMART contracts? My email provider is smarter than that.

A better term would be dumb contracts.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#427

Post by hedora »

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…

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.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#428

Post by globular-toast »

djhworld wrote: post #307
globular-toast wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an accounting system, everything must always sum to zero. That means every transaction has to balance, so nothing can "appear" or "disappear", it has to come from somewhere and has to go somewhere. Imagine you ran a private currency called Mate Dollars (M$) for you and your mates to exchange with each other "off grid". You decide to introduce the concept of loans. A transaction which lends 1000M$ to MateA would lo…

I use plaintextaccounting too. So in your example Dungeon:MateA is a balance for the other side of the transaction - it does exist, there's a record of it. The money/tokens/matebucks have not "disappeared", but the mechanics of the "promise" means that nothing/no-one can do this operation 2022-01-30 Silly transaction Dungeon:MateA -1000.00M$ Account:MateA 1000.00M$

Exactly. They've "disappeared" from outside of the ledger, in the sense that those tokens will never be involved in another transaction so won't be "seen" again by anyone else. But they can never disappear from inside the ledger. That would violate the rules of accounting.

My main point with this is this is how the current money system works! People seem to think money can disappear in crypto but not in the real system. In fact it's quite the opposite. In both systems from the ledger's point of view nothing can appear or disappear. But in the current system, since the ledgers are controlled by private entities they can make stuff appear from the public point of view by creating loans. In crypto the ledger is not controlled by anyone.

Essentially the big problem with finance currently is the people who control the ledger are also allowed to create loans inside the ledger! It's a huge conflict of interest and obscenely privileged position.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#429

Post by ajross »

nickjj wrote: post #381

Here's an unrelated but related question: How do you store your wallet / private keys where you would be comfortable storing an amount of money that's important to you? It feels like a bunch of consumer grade options we have are kind of flaky: Flash drives are extremely undependable. I've had a few fail to read after sitting in a closet for a year. SSDs can supposedly have data loss pretty quickly if left unpowered (…

There's a misconception here, I think. "Backups" are the problem, not the solution. Once any one of them is compromised, the money is gone. Having more backups increases your risk.

I don't play in this world, but if I did, I'd note that the actual keys required to define a wallet are trivially small and comparatively easily re-entered at a keyboard by hand. If you're got millions in this stuff that you need to park, delete it from the internet, print it out, and stick it in a safe.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#430

Post by capableweb »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #414
capableweb wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So your definition for "valid action" is just that the eth network lets them do it? Yes, this is indeed the definition for "valid", that the protocol allows them to do it. It was a valid action, but not the action the user actually wanted to perform. There are two ways of avoiding these scenarios: A) use UIs and don't interact with the protocol without safeguards, as the UI will prevent you from making mistakes (th…

"It was a valid action, but not the action the user actually wanted to perform." It's an action noone ever has ever wanted or ever will want to perform. In the same way putting your finger inside a power socket is an invalid action, and people who designed sockets were smart enough to make it impossible.

The only thing you're showcasing here is the lack of understanding of what happened.

This transfer was a transfer from one address to another. No one has ever wanted to do that? It's the entire point of cryptocurrencies!

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