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A Crypto User Sent $50k to a Smart Contract. It's Gone Forever
- piracy1 6y agoA donation to everyone, deflation
- toomuchtodo 6y agoFrom the bottom: > Still, user mistakes keep occurring with unenviable regularity. In late October, someone sent 28,050 AAVE tokens—worth around $1.1 million at the time—to the wrong address, which resulted in the irreversible loss of their funds. It’s a scary world out there. Incredible.
- slyall 6y ago" Some activities superficially familiar to you are merely stupid and should be avoided for your safety, [..] These include: giving your bank account details to the son of the Nigerian Minister of Finance; buying title to bridges [..] and entering into financial contracts with entities running Economics 2.0 or higher. " - Accelerando by Charles Stross
- jsnk 6y agoWhy don't these tech support the oldest trick every financial companies have been doing? They send a cent and see if the recipient received it or not. If the money went through and is secured, then send the rest. Simply by doing this, you could avoid almost all incidents like these.
- CryptoPunk 6y agoPeople do do that. There's millions of transactions that go through for every one disaster like this.
- JeremyBanks 6y agoTransactions are often slow and expensive.
- capnorange 6y agoI do this for every new address that I send to.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y agoI fairly regularly do that. It's easy to get complacent and as the average fee increases it becomes a higher and higher incentive to just send the amount.
- olliej 6y agoEach transaction takes minutes to complete, and costs an absurd amount of money.
- puranjay 6y agoOn decentralized exchanges, a single ERC-20 coin transaction can sometimes be as expensive as $50+ in gas fees and take 15-30 minutes to confirm. Sending a test transaction of $1 is not always feasible.
- dboreham 6y agoDecentralized exchanges like Uniswap?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- woodruffw 6y agoIt's not 50k (more like $50), but I have a similar story with Stellar. I was one of the (thousands of?) people who Keybase/Stellar/mysterious parties decided to gift some of their tokens to. I tried to transfer them to a provider with my bank information, and immediately flushed them into /dev/null because I didn't understand the separate sequences of numbers that I was supposed to provide. I wasn't exactly upset, but it really solidified my opinion of the entire space: as an end user, my single greatest interest is the fidelity of the transactions that I take part in. Tack onto that the constant whirlwind of technical compromises that lack legal recourse, and my feelings of confidence approach zero.
- themodelplumber 6y agoThat's a pain. If you might still be willing to give the _entire_ entire space a try, it's getting easier to participate with services like Coinbase and e.g. XLM-USD trading, which is different from holding XLM. (Is that a cup with handle on the 1D?) Or trading crypto-related stocks, even.
- captn3m0 6y agoThat's just gambling with extra steps.
- themodelplumber 6y agoEverything looks like gambling if you squint hard enough. Always use a risk management framework, and then you can squint at everything again and see investments.
- guiambros 6y ago> It's not 50k (more like $50) Uh? LINK is currently at $13.65 [1]. x 4,005 tokens = $54,668 EDIT: I misread; parent was speaking of their own loss of $50, not correcting the original article's accuracy. [1] https://www.coinbase.com/price/chainlink https://www.coinbase.com/price/chainlink
- captn3m0 6y agoI'm never trusting software for two things: 1. Voting 2. Irreversible transactions
- dheera 6y agoI suppose I'll be downvoted for this but my unpopular opinion is that I feel like the voting problem is solvable with some combination of decentralized and cryptographic tech. It's just that the people who can solve it don't want to solve it.
- war1025 6y agoThe thing about voting is that for the public to trust voting, it needs to be something a general member of the public can understand. That is why paper balloting is such a durable voting mechanism. Pretty well anyone can understand how you would take a stack of paper ballots and decide who got the most votes. From there you just need to maintain a chain of custody where all ballots are monitored by any interested parties from the time they are cast to the time they are counted. The more technical you get with your voting solutions, the less overall trust the public will have in the final vote counts.
- sebmellen 6y agoI understand the argument here, but to play devil's advocate... In the 2020 presidential election, tens of millions of people had trouble understanding how paper ballots worked. I'm not sure the argument about public trust is that durable or cogent at this point.
- tylerhou 6y agoMost people who claim that there was fraud in the election focus on the voting machines — that they were programmed to "flip" votes, there were servers in Germany, or they had some linearly "weighted" mode which was allegedly turned on. They claim that "the algorithm" caused the election to be stolen from Trump. If we created a cryptographic voting system with homomorphic encryption to preserve privacy, they would be claiming the exact same thing — except in that case, you wouldn't be able to recount the ballots by hand.
- raiyu 6y agoI like that one of the recommended solutions is to use named addresses instead of wallet hashes. DNS and domains instead of IP addresses
- DarthGhandi 6y agoENS is nothing like DNS despite both being name services. ENS is decentralised and not subject to a plethora of attacks that give DNS a bad name. A bad actor maliciously taking control of a ENS address means it's likely you'll lose your money whether you send it to 1.1.1.1 or one.one.one.one Think you should trust the Solidity dev on this one rather than intuition.
- h_anna_h 6y agoDNS(/namecoin) and domains instead of tor addresses rather.
- rini17 6y agoThat is a non-solution. DNS spoofing is notorious, and it's same for any "meaningful" names. If there isn't a checksum it's actually harder to detect a typo, human brain tends to autocorrect it. Domains also rely on trusted third party and are stolen all the time.
- iJohnDoe 6y agoThere is a portion of my brain that might never be able to comprehend digital currency with real money. It’s possible I’m not incapable of understanding it. All I’ve ever heard are exchanges that are so grossly incompetent that I would never even think about engaging with. Months of waiting for verification that never happens. Waiting for transfers that never happen. Uploading passports and drivers licenses to an exchange, and bank account information, to only think that 6 months from now there will be a breach and all my information is downloaded by criminals. It’s a full stop to not even consider proceeding. I would love to know how someone can convert Bitcoin or other digital currency to millions of USD that are capable of hitting a bank account, that can be spent at the local grocery store. I watched as Bitcoin became a thing and never even considered touching it because I didn’t even remotely wanted to be associated with criminals using it for drugs and other illegal stuff. Anyways, digital currency is just so bizarre to me.
- barnaclejive 6y ago"welp, fck this, I'm not doing crypto anytime soon" - most people who are technically competent but not experts, including myself
- ExcavateGrandMa 6y agoKrkrkrkrkRKrkrkrkrk... am wondering how do you feel when u understand u lost... what's happening in your head really... :Ð what could you perform if you loose the control... :Ð may we call that the monsterz factory?
- dang 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25443212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25443212