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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?

#591

Post by sanderjd »

FDSGSG wrote: post #561
johnchristopher wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes to show that cryptomoney has not yet a settled common set of words to describe what's happening, unlike applications which have "gui, compilers, loop, trees, objects, etc.". It's still to much specialized to follow what's going on from a higher viewpoint.

I don't think so. The terminology is quite standardised, but just like "gui, compilers, loop, trees, objects, etc." you're not going to know them unless you're familiar with the subject.

I think you're both right to a degree. I agree the jargon is pretty well defined at this point, but it certainly is not as widely understood as the earlier computing and internet jargon. I think the mainstream is in the phase of basically having no idea whatsoever. I am sympathetic to them. I think they feel chuffed with themselves for finally figuring out what Bitcoin is, and now we're telling them they're still over half a decade behind the curve?!

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#594

Post by SilasX »

tommek4077 wrote: post #18
ab_testing wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a problem with crypto that will forever prevent it from becoming mainstream. The average person understands the concept of money but understanding smart contracts is out of scope for a large part of the general population m

Just because you can do crazy stuff, doesn't mean you have to do it. Like the normal guy isn't trading interst rate derivates or stuff like that. Also at least with european banking, if you wringly send money to another account, it is also gone forever. A lot of scams regarding old people build up on this. We do not need to buy google play store vouchers like the americans tonget scammed.

>Like the normal guy isn't trading interst rate derivates or stuff like that.

Heh, funny you say that, because there was the submission about the danger of the 30-year fixed mortgage, and how the typical borrower is in fact, making an effective bet on interest rate derivatives!

See this thread that quotes that part: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29774806

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#595

Post by cliftonk »

captn3m0 wrote: post #288
cliftonk wrote: post #15

there's about $20b worth of eth in the weth contract. $1.1m of eth has been lost this way (so op's lost weth is about 45% of all weth lost from transfers). https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead...

What’s the other 20b worth of eth for?

most smart contracts that deal with tokens (swaps, borrowing, etc) use the ERC-20 standard. WETH is a simple smart contract where you deposit X eth and you receive x weth in return (where weth is a token that adheres to the ERC-20 standard). you can then use that weth to swap, borrow and lend in the same way you would with any other erc-20 token.

most users never have to deal with the WETH contract because defi platforms will automatically do the wrapping/unwrapping for you.

the vast majority of the WETH minted by this contract is used for

a) providing liquidity on DEXs (where ~ 50% tokenA and 50% tokenB are deposited to collect trading fees)

b) collateral in a lending platform (e.g. deposit WETH and borrow USDC)

c) bridged to another chain (e.g. bridge WETH to Avalanche or Solana or whatever)

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#596

Post by [deleted] »

FDSGSG wrote: post #566
ddingus wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference! The incentive was robust code that would work well, get it done, go to the moon. Here, machine time is expensive, puts emphasis on code that works, but just barely... Let's just say NASA would check for the "yup, you are gonna burn some money" case, and reject it.

Well, there's about $3B worth of WETH issued and only about $1.1M worth of those have been lost due to mistakes like the OPs. I think that people are so unlikely to fuck this up that such a check would be rather pointless.

[deleted]

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#597

Post by ddingus »

FDSGSG wrote: post #566
ddingus wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference! The incentive was robust code that would work well, get it done, go to the moon. Here, machine time is expensive, puts emphasis on code that works, but just barely... Let's just say NASA would check for the "yup, you are gonna burn some money" case, and reject it.

Well, there's about $3B worth of WETH issued and only about $1.1M worth of those have been lost due to mistakes like the OPs. I think that people are so unlikely to fuck this up that such a check would be rather pointless.

Again NASA would disagree.

Money matters a lot. Should this mess endure, people will forever be saying a little bit of gas would have been worth it.

And we've people with six figure arguments as to why such a check makes sense.

The idea of minimal code, focused on speed coupled with financials leads me FAR away from all this.

I will watch with great interest and entertainment.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#599

Post by ddingus »

capableweb wrote: post #587
zepto wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prev…

"simply Google search would have showed them the way"

That is how high toxicity systems get made.

Re: Did I just lose half a million dollars?

#600

Post by giaour »

capableweb wrote: post #435
giaour wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, no one has argued that transaction validation for this specific smart contract should be built into wallets. You're arguing with a straw man. The point I see made instead is that the smart contract should not be coded to behave as it does. If a financial product at a retail bank set a pile of cash on fire when you used it incorrectly, regulators would swoop in and make the industry add some safe…

It's very hard to draw parallels from cryptocurrencies to other things as it's not like other things we have today. Some sort of analogy could be margin calls/puts. Imagine someone who doesn't know how margin trading works used it, and lost half a million dollars. Who's at fault here? The bank for allowing it, the financial system for having the feature or the user for not educating themselves enough to understand ho…

> Some sort of analogy could be margin calls/puts.

That is not a comparable situation. The ETH/WETH trader misused a negotiable instrument, and 500K disappeared forever. Someone who loses 500K gambling on margin was gambling and lost. If they somehow mistakenly placed an order on margin, there's probably a process to reverse the transaction and get your funds returned within a specific time window (that's just a guess on my part, though, and it probably depends on the brokerage used).

> It's very hard to draw parallels from cryptocurrencies to other things as it's not like other things we have today.

I don't think this is true; cryptocurrency in this situation is very similar to cash. You can get mugged while holding 500K in a briefcase, and the funds are unrecoverable absent legal restitution. But that's why banks make you sign a waiver of liability when you withdraw large sums in cash.

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