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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?

#581

Post by gnabgib »

e12e wrote: post #446
neuronic wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> decentralized After reading Moxie's blog post on web3 [1] I feel it is a stretch to call anything Ehtereum-based decentralized anymore when this many applications use Alchemy or Infura as providers for their Ethereum nodes. [1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Thank you for that link, I see it was posted to hn, but gained little traction. It certainly puts words to my feelings around current "crypto" trends as someone (probably like moxie) that still remember the first wave of cypherpunks[1] and dreams of digital currencies. It feels strange when a lot of smart people insists on something that's obviously false in a practical, real-world sense - and it's nice to see someon…

3392pts and 1129comments is "little traction"??

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845208

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#582

Post by jollybean »

capableweb wrote: post #575
jollybean wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What % of the people that use IBAN, know that there is a checksum, know what a checksum even is, or how to apply it? Thankfully we have banks to deal with that - and legal framework that can help us undo problems. "But you can use an exchange with ETH!" Like banks? Making such networks ostensibly not 'decentralized'? The entire point of Crypto/Blockchain is that is decentralized and is accessible to everyone. If it r…

I think you missed that the user went beyond just using something to swap ETH for WETH and instead interacted directly (manually) with the contract, effectively bypassing the safe-guards that are already in place (even without exchanges) to prevent issues. The user basically guessed that this is how you turn ETH into WETH and vice-versa, without actually reading anything about it. If the user searched for "How do I t…

It doesn't really matter that 'someone did something they should not'.

People will always press the Magic Red Button without knowing what it does with some, if rare, consistency. That's human nature, ergo, our systems must accommodate.

The fact it's possible to lose $500K whereupon 'nothing can be done about it' is a 'dealbreaker' for this tech.

The truth is, when one goes down the rabbit hole, one discovers that ETH doesn't really solve any problems and creates a bunch of problematic side-effects. When you solve those side-effects you end up with something that looks like a regulated banking system.

There needs to be a new angle/twist or use case that we haven't thought of yet, in order for any of this to make sense. We risk getting into accidents when we drive a car, because the 'upside' of fast travel is worth the risk. There's just no real upside with Crypto yet. NFT was a neat idea, but that's not it either.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#583

Post by NateEag »

capableweb wrote: post #302
noduerme wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the right way. Default behavior for any box should be to bounce. I forward all my wrong mail to a black hole but that's because I'm not a fucking smart contract

Again, if you try to send funds to an invalid address on Ethereum, you won't be able to. First the wallet will stop you if the address is invalid, secondly no miner/validator would pick it up from the mempool if the address is invalid and thirdly, no other party would agree that the address is valid and hence the transfer wouldn't go through. Simply said: you cannot send funds to invalid addresses on Ethereum.

But you can send funds to an address the funds cannot be retrieved from.

A protocol could conceivably require the recipient to verify they're holding the private key for the address before the transaction can take place.

Yet here we are.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#584

Post by TheFreim »

CJefferson wrote: post #440
in3d wrote: post #209

It's not a great situation that this is possible but you could make a similar error for the same amount of money in your brokerage account and also have no recourse. It could be a typo in the ticker symbol, you could buy an option for the wrong month, you could buy instead of selling, you could enter an extra zero, you could not notice a multiplier for the futures, you could let a physical delivery future expire, etc…

If I tried to buy "Applr" instead of "Apple", then either: a) There is a company called "Applr", so I at least have something (a different stock) b) There is no comany called "Applr", so the trade is cancelled. This is like saying "You tried to be Applr, that doesn't exist, so you money just got blackholed".

> There is no comany called "Applr", so the trade is cancelled.

I'm surprised there hasn't been something like this developed in the cryptocurrency space yet. Some sort of system where creating a wallet requires initialization before it can receive anything. Something like that would prevent most problems of typing in the wrong address because it would not be initialized.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#585

Post by [deleted] »

gws wrote: post #73
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…

I don’t understand why these contracts don’t let addresses that make this particular error recover their funds, it would be easy to implement at contract creation or am I missing something?

[deleted]

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#586

Post by SilasX »

Scarblac wrote: post #51
tetha wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, but wouldn't smart contracts have to be as complex as a non-smart contract, if a smart contract were to replace the dumb contract? If I'm looking at the regular B2B contracts I'm supporting at work, even normal contracts are already testing people. Piling (highly complicated, mind you) software on top of that problem seems nuts and entirely not feasible.

Non-smart contracts also have something like the two sides having an understanding of what the spirit of what they agreed was, and they can be discussed in court and interpreted by a judge when all else fails. So not absolutely everything has to be spelled out all the time. Smart contracts are code and there is no fallback mechanism in case of mistakes. They probably have to be way more complicated than non-smart con…

>Smart contracts are code and there is no fallback mechanism in case of mistakes.

Well, there is, but it's hard to pull off -- you can get the entire network to hard-fork to reverse it, like in the DAO hack response.

https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/the-dao-the-hack-...

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#587

Post by capableweb »

zepto wrote: post #579
capableweb wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about the user from https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/sfz4kw/did_i_just... ? And do you mean "read-only memory"? I'm not sure how that's relevant. The contract they made the transfer to is read-only yes, like any contract on Ethereum. But they could have tested the contract call with a smaller sum before actually performing the bigger one. Just like the people writing the computer that took u…

The idea that people need to treat financial transactions in crypto as if they were writing software for a moon mission shows how impractical the entire space is.

If that was the case, I'd agree with you. But as outlined in the comments of this submission time and time again, it was not what happened here.

The user was not doing a normal transfer (at least, they didn't want to, but they ended up doing). They didn't know what they were doing at all, a simply Google search would have showed them the way. Using UIs instead of interacting with the contract directly would have prevented them from making the mistake they did. Doing a small test transfer before doing the big one would have revealed what was wrong as well.

It's not that I'm comparing writing software for moon missions with making cryptocurrency transactions. I was directly replying to mox1 implying that writing 100% correct code is impossible and shouldn't be attempted.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#588

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#589

Post by rosndo »

ciupicri wrote: post #478
rosndo wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is elementary school level math, no citation needed. The modulo 97 checksum offers known guarantees.

I think there's a misunderstanding here. If the customer mistypes the IBAN account number, the bank (website, app etc) will automatically reject it as invalid immediately, he won't have to deal with the customer service.

Yes, but the misunderstanding is on your side.

This is overly simplified so not entirely accurate, but if 100 customers typo their destination IBAN the modulo 97 checksum will probably let 3 of them through.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#590

Post by capableweb »

jollybean wrote: post #582
capableweb wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed that the user went beyond just using something to swap ETH for WETH and instead interacted directly (manually) with the contract, effectively bypassing the safe-guards that are already in place (even without exchanges) to prevent issues. The user basically guessed that this is how you turn ETH into WETH and vice-versa, without actually reading anything about it. If the user searched for "How do I t…

It doesn't really matter that 'someone did something they should not'. People will always press the Magic Red Button without knowing what it does with some, if rare, consistency. That's human nature, ergo, our systems must accommodate. The fact it's possible to lose $500K whereupon 'nothing can be done about it' is a 'dealbreaker' for this tech. The truth is, when one goes down the rabbit hole, one discovers that ETH…

> People will always press the Magic Red Button without knowing what it does with some, if rare, consistency. That's human nature, ergo, our systems must accommodate.

Are you also frustrated that you can run `rm -rf --no-preserve-root` on your computer and it's not possible to get back your data unless you had backups since before? Clearly, this is a dealbreaker for UNIX because it allows you to delete your root partition. Why would you ever need that?

> NFT was a neat idea, but that's not it either.

Yeah, no, NFTs were and remain a disgusting idea, but thanks for revealing your opinion on that, makes it easier to understand where the falsehoods in the rest of your message comes from.

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