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I lost all my savings in a mistaken Ethereum transaction

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Re: I lost all my savings in a mistaken Ethereum transaction

#91

Post by AndrewStephens »

gruez wrote: post #29
SamBam wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you wouldn't. You could almost certainly recover the money. If you wire money to the wrong place, and that person won't return it, that's theft. Likewise, if someone suddenly receives an unexpected million dollars in the account, they should not consider spending it -- that would be a big mistake.

>If you wire money to the wrong place, and that person won't return it, that's theft. maybe, but good luck prosecuting/recovering it if it's outside your country's jurisdiction.

Two things: It is quite hard to wire money to the wrong address. There are a lot of checks and I have been quite impressed with every bank I have dealt with being diligent in ringing me up to confirm the details, even for relatively small amounts.

Secondly, unless the destination person/organization is actually criminal, reversing a mistake is usually a phone call/polite letter away. If that fails then the legal system is there.

I guess wiring money to a criminal by mistake is possible but it seems unlikely. Deliberately wiring money to a criminal is very possible but you are on your own there. And even then it should be possible to track them down using the destination bank account unless the bank itself is shady.

Crypto has all of the disadvantages of wiring money (I guess it is usually cheaper) with none of the advantages.

Re: I lost all my savings in a mistaken Ethereum transaction

#92

Post by ghaff »

dragonwriter wrote: post #88
gwbas1c wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why did this guy put his life savings in a crypto Good point, (which was my first reaction.) But consider this: If, when you were young, you bought a few $1000 of Microsoft stock, Apple stock, Google stock, ect, when they went public, that investment could have grown to be the majority of your life savings. Perhaps dawidkabani13 just happened to buy some tokens at the right time? A lot of people don't save. Otherwi…

> But consider this: If, when you were young, you bought a few $1000 of Microsoft stock, Apple stock, Google stock, ect, when they went public, that investment could have grown to be the majority of your life savings. And if you did it in lots of other promising stocks at the same time, it would have been a major error. If you have reliable information from the future, sure, it makes sense to dump your life's savings…

Yep. To give a specific example, a lot of people (many of them employees) had a significant portion of their savings in Enron stock.

Re: I lost all my savings in a mistaken Ethereum transaction

#93

Post by pwdisswordfish0 »

aardshark wrote: post #40
fileeditview wrote: post #7

The most downvoted comment in the Github issue seems totally right.. why did this guy put his life savings in a crypto? Even without making any mistake this seems like a dumb move.

So what? The comment is totally off topic and contributes nothing except to call the guy an idiot. The Github issue is not the right place to do that.

Bug trackers are no place to even post the sort of message that OP posted to begin with. Once you permit that, then all bets are off on trying to keep out stuff that's "off topic".

Dealing with people is sometimes annoying. Give anyone anything with a text box attached to a carrier than can convey a message, and it will devolve into people treating it like email or a general purpose message board(). Such is life in the GitHubiverse.

(even ostensibly smart people who should be capable of dealing with semantic nuance, like people who write code)

Re: I lost all my savings in a mistaken Ethereum transaction

#94

Post by londons_explore »

elil17 wrote: post #84

If the Aveegotchi person is based in a jurisdictions with laws that would be favorable, one solution is to sue him. You could make the argument that he should return the money (and that creating a computer program which was unable to allow him to do so was his own fault). It’s a similar fact pattern to Citigroup v. Brigade Capital Management (which seems like it could go in Citigroup’s favor). Of course it seems like…

You may be right... But I would hope a court would rule that "I was experimenting with this other guys computer code and it ate my money" wouldn't lead to liability for the author of the code unless the loss can proved to be either deliberate or limited to the gain of the author (rather than the loss of the victim).

Re: I lost all my savings in a mistaken Ethereum transaction

#95

Post by londons_explore »

stefap2 wrote: post #79

OT, but what was the purpose of this transfer, expecting appreciation of currency? With money transfers, one should always send a small amount and confirm receipt, rather then sending giant amounts ?

Fees discourage the sending of test amounts.

Re: I lost all my savings in a mistaken Ethereum transaction

#97

Post by mekkkkkk »

It seems like this is an issue of tooling, no? If crypto by definition is to be without governance, and contracts are immutable, then you better use some damn good tools/services to make sure transfers and contracts are setup and executed correctly. Any type of silly mistake like this should be made practically impossible, since it's inherently irreversible by design.

So was this guy just playing around with manual setups? Or is that perhaps the only way to do things?

Re: I lost all my savings in a mistaken Ethereum transaction

#98

Post by Aeolun »

howlgarnish wrote: post #12
fileeditview wrote: post #7

The most downvoted comment in the Github issue seems totally right.. why did this guy put his life savings in a crypto? Even without making any mistake this seems like a dumb move.

While that's a very valid question, it's not helpful to the OP.

I kind of feel like he got what he deserved? Like, it’s not fun to lose your life’s savings, but...

Re: I lost all my savings in a mistaken Ethereum transaction

#99

Post by pwdisswordfish0 »

evan_ wrote: post #41
sz4kerto wrote: post #25

Can someone ELI5 who has/owns the $50k worth of crypto now? (I don't know what the GHST staking contract means.)

I think it’s just gone, like he’d set cash on fire... right?

It was never 'there' to begin with, so it's not like that, really.

It's like he said, "Hey, let's play a game. Right now, everyone agrees I should have 50k quatloos to do something with. (That's not the game; that's a fact and the premise going into the game.) The game is this: I'll write a note, and let's all agree that ultimately I will no longer have 50k quatloos after I publish the note, okay?" In fact, it's so much like that, that that's pretty much what it is.

(Getting it "back" is a matter of getting everyone to agree that "okay, now you have the 50k quatloos again".)

Re: I lost all my savings in a mistaken Ethereum transaction

#100

Post by jjk166 »

dastx wrote: post #89
ashtonkem wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occasionally people get rich playing roulette, per a sibling comment. Occasional good luck doesn’t validate a bad decision making process.

I'm not validating a bad decision. I'm saying that we don't know anything about why he made that decision, and until we do, we have no right to judge him for it.

It being a dumb decision is a reasonable null hypothesis. Sure maybe someone held a gun to his head and forced him to put his life savings into ethereum, but there's no reason to believe that to be the case.
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