Reading these comments after watching Dan Olson's NFT vid is like putting on the They Live glasses.
Losing a half million dollars worth of crypto by mistake is something that needs to be addressed before crypto can become mainstream. When it's this easy to lose everything, there's no way your grandma is going to be using it.
Yeah that's a feature, not a bug :ancap-good:
Yeah immutability is the entire use case for the blockchain and crypto by extension. Decentralization is the other. Reversing transactions will require some kind of centralized organization that can make changes and will have to be seen as authoritative, allowing them to disseminate those changes to everyone else. You just end up making a vastly less efficient bank.
I checked OP's history and he's an old timer, he bought/mined those coins back when they were cheap.
He held for years, through all the peaks and crashes, just so he could lose it all like this.
Lol. Lmao.
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. I think a big part of the confusion is in the fact that the deposit function is called automatically when you send ETH, and withdraw isn't.
:jesse-wtf: I have used crypto for buying stuff in the past but what the fuck is this :wtf-am-i-reading:
this actually points to a horrifying oversight in the smart contract design. For some context a smart contract is a program that runs on a blockchain. It has its own account that nobody can access depending on how it's been programmed. By default there is a function that gets called when someone sends cryptocurrency to the smart contract, and apparently in this case it will return an equivalent amount of "WETH" for the amount of "ETH" transferred. But the inverse isn't true. To get your "ETH" back you have to call a specific function called "withdraw".
ERC-20 Tokens are smart contracts that just keep a record of accounts that knows who has what balance. It's not a "real" token in the same sense of Ethereum or Bitcoin. When you transfer an ERC-20 token you have to tell the smart contract you are transferring X amount to Y address and it records that transaction and your balances are subesequently updated.
So what is apparently happening here is people are transferring WETH to the address of the smart contract and the smart contract treats that as a normal transaction between third parties. There is no special logic. The smart contract has no way of actually transferring that money back to people. The only way it can transfer you WETH tokens is by sending it ETH. The only way it can transfer you ETH tokens is by calling "withdraw". Transferring means that money is on its books under its own account permanently.
Wow, regular crypto's "If you send money to wrong address you won't get it back" sounds normal compared to that
So where did the half a million worth of Ethereum actually end up, and why were they transferring it there in the first place?
Is it just sitting in this smart account, unaccessible until the end of time? Or did it end up in another person's wallet?
I think they expected it to work like when they transferred the ethereum there. And the half a million worth of ETH is now in the smart contract's account as a positive balance forever.
If I'm reading the comments right the way it works is you transfer your eth to the smart contract and it puts the equivalent amount of wETH in your account on its books. So say I transfer 10 ETH to it, it says "ok now frick owns 10 WETH". Now I can transfer that to other people or whatever and every time there's a transaction it gets recorded by the smart contract.
So now I want to trade in my WETH for ETH because I want to exchange it for Real Money Baybee. Naturally I just transfer my WETH to the smart contract and get the ETH back because that's how it worked the first time around right? Wrong. I transfer my WETH to the smart contract and the smart contract goes "Oh cool now WETH Smart Contract owns 10 WETH and frick owns 0".
Generally you interact with a smart contract by "calling methods", just like a normal API in any computer system. This one has a feature where you can get what you want (the contract will report you have a certain # of wETH) just by transferring ETH to it. It's much more efficient this way because transferring the native ETH token is the cheapest type of transaction, it's like a couple of bucks right now vs 50 or more. But a smart contract is just code, it can only take actions that were built in before hand. In this case, apparently, there's no method to call that would transfer erc-20 tokens back to address they came from, actually that would be possible and as far as I understand wouldn't result in extra gas costs for other transactions, although it would be more expensive to deploy, anyway probably a good idea overall but as they say hindsight is erc-20.
This system is not user friendly and mistakes cannot be undone, even the creator of smart contracts still does things like quadruple checking all the stuff in his transactions and doing performing actions with tiny amounts of tokens before the full amount (costing double tx fees) even when he's 99.99% sure they're fine. This is pretty much necessary, no way around it for a maximally decentralized computer system, you have to agree to the rules before hand and stick to them 100%. You can make the rules more forgiving to mistakes but you have to anticipate these mistakes before you deploy your code.
Politics aside (because my curiosity is overtaking my contempt for users of crypto) what the hell can you even buy with the stuff?
one of my previous server providers didn't accept my card for some reason so I had to pay with crypto.
I bought weed seeds using Bitcoin a couple years ago but never used it since
I can’t agree.
The entire principle that someone doesn’t need to even attempt to care to understand a technology they’re using - yes, cars and computers included - is what got us where we are.
No, you don’t need to design the technology, but if you don’t have a basic grasp of … a microwave oven, a car’s starter, engine, and steering column… or public key crypto and blockchain addresses, this is what happens. No, it’s not desirable, and I hope OP didn’t lose a half mil.
This can really be as simple as “EM waves add energy to things but you can’t put things metal that reflect/otherwise distort EM waves in it” (even being nice here and not caring that some absorb better), or “fuel explodes and in the engine repeatedly which is connected to a series of gears and a drive shaft”, or “math makes guessing this part hard, so part is my secret and part can go to everyone”, but people want to be BOTH ignorant totally AND have “complete freedom from any consequences”… which just isn’t how the world works.
What a bunch of bazinga brain nonsense. Some I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE, gee whiz explanation for how your microwave works is not the same thing as understanding how it works. Just going "cell phones are just communicating with towers through radio" is not understanding cell phones. What this really boils down to is that if you're not a pop-sci redditor who thinks science is just neat facts then you don't deserve to use crypto. That goes against this decentralized, democratic idea of money they want to push. Just letting your grandma starve because she doesn't read Neil DeGrasse Tyson tweets isn't a solution.
These people are so fucking fake. Using crypto makes them feel like special little smart people and that's pretty much it. You can't let the "uneducated" plebs taint their special smart boy tokens.
Lol what a dumb post by that person
I know how my microwave works. Cold food goes in, I hit the button 5 times, hot food comes out
Imagine if you had to have an elementary understanding of electromagnetism to use a microwave. What would be the outcome? Very very few people would use microwaves 🤔
Crypto was never about putting money back in the hands of the working class, it was just another avenue for wallstreet to speculate and bet on, hence why the big holders of it are hedge funds and wealthy investors and not average working people.
My turn on the lathe: we will see, within the next five years, a bitcoin bailout. Because of the concentration in hedge funds, if bitcoin collapses to its real value (zero) and leverage in the system, line will go down. One or two hedge funds will go bankrupt and congress will act to address systemic risk
it’s just an avenue that the wealthy see as an opportunity to become the ultrawealthy if they can get in. Every few years there’s something like this that gives them an opportunity to cash in. It was apps and smart phones in the 2010s, it was .com shit in the 90s/early 00s.
Wow, a monetary system that is hard to understand and use, which doesn't forgive mistakes and can cost millions. In other words, just exactly what we need from our future money system!
It's a bit of a liberals wet dream to make access to services education gated (like laws and courts, and currently investment, and even things like employment contracts, health insurance, etc.) to be able to deny those who make errors the service. If they can do that with day to day banking and money, bingo. Oh sorry sweaty, you lost your life savings? Shouldnt have made that mistake dumdum.
It's hilarious how easy it is to do this kind of thing with crypto.
Best part is it doesn't even go to an anyone. All that "value" just goes poof over a typo. All that electronic waste, electricity, GHG emissions...
You could argue it goes to everyone by increasing scarcity, but the reminder of how you can carelessly just lose everything probably hurts the value by more
Edit 3: I am also sorry that this was a negative event for the perception of cryptocurrencies. The last thing I would want in this world :(
lmao
If real…(scrolling comments, and it seems he is not kidding, he’s been doing crypto for a while… but makes rookie mistakes)holy shit!
:what-the-hell:
Broke: Crypto
Woke: Savings Account
Bespoke: Mason jars full of coins buried in the yard.
I fret over first time bank transfers of more than $100, checking balances several times a day until they go through confirming that all the routing info is stored correct. when I was pulling / aggregating a down payment from multiple accounts, I was a nervous wreck.
I can't even imagine this sketchy crypto shit, or the mindset that doesn't do a test transaction of a much smaller amount first.
Nah I'm still going to antagonize you, I just gave up on having civil discourse.
