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So, how do you cancel a transaction with such an obvious mistake when it is recorded on a blockchain? (This is a rhetorical question.) EDIT: Why the downvotes

by p4bl0 5y ago

So, how do you cancel a transaction with such an obvious mistake when it is recorded on a blockchain? (This is a rhetorical question.) EDIT: Why the downvotes? It's not okay to discuss the fact that in the possibility of human error (assuming this is one, and not a very wild —yet successful— bet on a laundering attempt), the incapacity to cancel transaction may be a problem?

brockwhittaker 5y ago
You're getting downvoted because it's a longtime well-known problem of the blockchain. The answer to your question is that nobody can reverse the transaction or undo it. That's kind of the point, for better or or for $23m worse.
_3u10 5y ago
You're pointing out an obvious major flaw with blockchain that is a consequence of what many in the crypto community believe to be an advantage, namely that your assets cannot be seized without your private key. Your post is basically this, but less humorous so people are upset. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ So to answer your question, how you revert this transaction is to buy $5 wrench and go have a conversation with the miner.
aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
It’s pretty easy to revert it: you fork the protocol. The ETH guys already did this once, hence Ethereum Classic.
- ricardobeat 5y ago
  The idea that the code maintainers get to decide which transactions are valid or not is insane. Almost as insane as saying an 'easy' fix is to arbitrarily fork the chain undermining it's whole purpose.
  - ac29 5y ago
    The new kingmakers are the stablecoins. Whichever chain they decide to honor has a huge amount of economic weight behind it. How much of this economic weight is real, at least in the case of Tether, is another story. I suspect we'll find out in the next few years as regulation ramps up.
  - sgarman 5y ago
    I'm not defending anything here but adding context. It wasn't JUST the "code maintainers." They made a proposal and all of the nodes "voted" by opting in or out. A lot of them opted out (Eth Classic) but majority usually wins in these situations. Did certain entities have more influence or power in this situation, yes 100%. Is that better or worse then how it would play out in standard US finance system? I'm not sure, you decide.
    - davidcbc 5y ago
      USD doesn’t split into two different competing currencies when a transaction has to be reversed, so I think the ethereum solution is clearly worse.
      - PretzelPirate 5y ago
        You can roll back Ethereum transactions without forking the blockchain if you build the rollback mechanism into your settlement contract. There isn’t anything to “fork” in USD since it isn’t a blockchain, but different USD settlement layers get out of sync and have to be manually reconciled. If you instead tried to “fork”/replicate USD in that situation, you’d probably be thrown in jail for life. I personally prefer the blockchain way of expressing my option through code and seeing if anyone wants to follow me and not having to ask for permission.
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    > undermining it's whole purpose Quiet, now. We don't want people to know about systemic risks to crypto.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  And Ethereum Classic has a nice solution: 51% attack and mine the txn yourself.
twa999 5y ago
if it's mined the only possible way would be to bribe the miners to revert the blocks by paying even more (like time bandit attack) or renting soooo much hashpower to create your own fork. If it's not included yet you need to send another transaction with the same nonce that sends yourself 0 ether but with a higher gas price asap, this is not a guarantee however because the miner would probably still go with the transaction that is more profitable for them and because the fee was so high it got included in under 1 minute. So once this transaction landed in the (public?) mempool it was gg.
- tudorconstantin 5y ago
  And sending a tx with a fee bigger than $23m wouldn't actually fixed their problem
cwkoss 5y ago
Once it's recorded on the blockchain, there is no way to cancel it. If they are lucky, they may be able to reach out to the miner and get a portion returned. Probably just tough luck though.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  Unless you just get the devs to write it out of existence and fork the chain.
MichaelApproved 5y ago
I'm guessing you're also getting downvoted because sarcasm and rhetorical questions and not great ways of starting meaningful discussions.
- system2 5y ago
  Can't anyone ask question to HN Gods without fear of being ridiculed? I am also curious about this myself.
  - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
    Yes you can, but that wasn't a geniune question.
exporectomy 5y ago
Reversing transactions is massive problem in finance in general. It causes losses for merchants in both physical shops and online sellers because there's no objective measure of whether a transaction was a mistake or not so it's begging to be abused for fraud. Even if a court decides, somebody still loses when both parties had different expectations. People have overpaid wages or social welfare payments taken back from them after they already assumed it was correct and spent it, and are now in a big debt. People accidentally sign contracts that require them to pay more than they expected. There's fraud where people buy an item online, then claim they never received it and get their payment refunded while keeping the item. Here's an example of traditional finance screwing someone over for making an obvious mistake. Where's this ability to reverse transactions when you need it? https://www.livemint.com/opinion/online-views/a-fascinating-case-about-paying-a-900-million-debt-by-mistake-11607602031675.html https://www.livemint.com/opinion/online-views/a-fascinating-... You're assuming there's some benevolent God who can arbitrate who's right and who's wrong. In reality, people get screwed by bad payment reversal decisions all the time and there's no objective way to decide in every case.
- midev 5y ago
  > You're assuming there's some benevolent God who can arbitrate who's right and who's wrong Literally nobody assumes this. Please don't invent strawmen. The point is, even with all the failings of the courts, different interpretations of language, and every other flaw, it's still better than having no recourse at all. > There's fraud where people buy an item online, then claim they never received it and get their payment refunded while keeping the item. And of course, the blockchain solves none of this. It just makes rectifying the problem far more difficult.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    How would any reversals be decided without a benevolent God? I've shown that traditional finance can't do it "correctly". Apparently smart contracts can't either. Courts can't because the law is sometimes ambiguous and unknown before it's tested in court. Traditional contracts can't because people get tricked by not reading the fine print. I think nobody can except an imaginary benevolent God. If you just call the boss of reversals and say "sorry I made a terrible mistake, please reverse the payment", how can he trust that you're not the fraudster yourself? Even in the case in this article, how can any 3rd party truly know that it was a mistake and not just someone pretending it was a mistake so they can get it back? Blockchain solves the problem of chargeback fraud. It's one specific class of fraud but it's solved by that technology even if other classes of fraud are created.
elif 5y ago
it varies from coin to coin. in limited cases you can perform another operation which makes the preceding operation illegal. in normal cases, not being able to cancel is the entire point of the technology.
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
You can ask Buterik to roll it back for you. He did it once for the DAO guys, so worth a try. (Of course, that rollback also demonstrated that Ethereum is a centralised coin with a controlling entity, and that 'code is law' is just a lie, but that's another story)
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  No it didn't demonstrate that. Vitalik et al reached consensus for rolling back the DAO hack. A major reason why they reached consensus was that so many players had a vested interest in the rollback. If Vitalik had tried to push something unpopular, he wouldn't have been able to push it through, because - in contrast to your claims - Ethereum is not a centrally controlled blockchain.
  - SamBam 5y ago
    I guess you'd better hope you're never on the wrong side, politically, from a majority of ETH miners. "This guy who we all hate now owns $100MM in ETH? Now he doesn't."
    - rattlesnakedave 5y ago
      Yeah, miners and node operators. That’s how this has always worked.
    - ludamad 5y ago
      Yeah they can always coordinate, but these things are never so clean. They'd also need to be convinced it wouldn't undermine the network faith in a way against their interests, beyond being a well hated figure. And that no fork would emerge reinstating the person (as their deed is far from hidden)
    - erulabs 5y ago
      This is also how nation states work. And it takes probably far fewer people, less time, and can be done in secrecy when the US wants to enact a sanction and freeze accounts than it does to hard-fork ethereum.
Geee 5y ago
You negotiate with the recipient of the transaction to return the money.
- andruby 5y ago
  The fee went to the miner, not the recipient of the transaction. So probably an anonymous mining setup that has little incentive to return $23M
- davidcbc 5y ago
  That sounds like a lot of trust to put on someone in a “trustless” system
  - retrac 5y ago
    It's the exact same flaw as cash. If you mess up and send it to the wrong person in the mail or set it on fire, there is absolutely no recourse, unless there's someone to sue maybe. As long as you understand that I don't see the problem. I use cash a lot myself. Of course, we basically did invent the entire banking system to get away from the many downsides of literally lugging bags of gold around, like theft and loss without recourse.
    - davidcbc 5y ago
      Yeah, I hate it when I accidentally pay someone 6 orders of magnitude more than I meant to when I’m using cash. Just like cryptocurrency!
      - ric2b 5y ago
        Citibank managed to do it with USD and still hasn't gotten it back. Meanwhile in this case the miner gave back the money so maybe the tech isn't the issue?
dang 5y ago
Please don't go on about downvotes—this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If the downvotes were inappropriate, other users will usually correct them (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=corrective%20upvote https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), but off-topic, guidelines-breaking complaints like the one you added don't get garbage-collected when that happens, so they linger on, adding noise to the thread.
baby 5y ago
I'll answer even if it's rhetorical, but there are some blockchains (I used to work for one) that allow arbitrary state transitions as long as it's approved by an approved authority. Now, Ethereum has another way to fix this: forbid transactions that use a gas fee MUCH MUCH larger than the current average one.

by p4bl0 5y ago

brockwhittaker 5y ago

You're getting downvoted because it's a longtime well-known problem of the blockchain. The answer to your question is that nobody can reverse the transaction or undo it. That's kind of the point, for better or or for $23m worse.

_3u10 5y ago

You're pointing out an obvious major flaw with blockchain that is a consequence of what many in the crypto community believe to be an advantage, namely that your assets cannot be seized without your private key. Your post is basically this, but less humorous so people are upset. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ So to answer your question, how you revert this transaction is to buy $5 wrench and go have a conversation with the miner.

aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago

It’s pretty easy to revert it: you fork the protocol. The ETH guys already did this once, hence Ethereum Classic.

ricardobeat 5y ago
The idea that the code maintainers get to decide which transactions are valid or not is insane. Almost as insane as saying an 'easy' fix is to arbitrarily fork the chain undermining it's whole purpose.
- ac29 5y ago
  The new kingmakers are the stablecoins. Whichever chain they decide to honor has a huge amount of economic weight behind it. How much of this economic weight is real, at least in the case of Tether, is another story. I suspect we'll find out in the next few years as regulation ramps up.
- sgarman 5y ago
  I'm not defending anything here but adding context. It wasn't JUST the "code maintainers." They made a proposal and all of the nodes "voted" by opting in or out. A lot of them opted out (Eth Classic) but majority usually wins in these situations. Did certain entities have more influence or power in this situation, yes 100%. Is that better or worse then how it would play out in standard US finance system? I'm not sure, you decide.
  - davidcbc 5y ago
    USD doesn’t split into two different competing currencies when a transaction has to be reversed, so I think the ethereum solution is clearly worse.
    - PretzelPirate 5y ago
      You can roll back Ethereum transactions without forking the blockchain if you build the rollback mechanism into your settlement contract. There isn’t anything to “fork” in USD since it isn’t a blockchain, but different USD settlement layers get out of sync and have to be manually reconciled. If you instead tried to “fork”/replicate USD in that situation, you’d probably be thrown in jail for life. I personally prefer the blockchain way of expressing my option through code and seeing if anyone wants to follow me and not having to ask for permission.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  > undermining it's whole purpose Quiet, now. We don't want people to know about systemic risks to crypto.
X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
And Ethereum Classic has a nice solution: 51% attack and mine the txn yourself.

twa999 5y ago

if it's mined the only possible way would be to bribe the miners to revert the blocks by paying even more (like time bandit attack) or renting soooo much hashpower to create your own fork. If it's not included yet you need to send another transaction with the same nonce that sends yourself 0 ether but with a higher gas price asap, this is not a guarantee however because the miner would probably still go with the transaction that is more profitable for them and because the fee was so high it got included in under 1 minute. So once this transaction landed in the (public?) mempool it was gg.

tudorconstantin 5y ago
And sending a tx with a fee bigger than $23m wouldn't actually fixed their problem

cwkoss 5y ago

Once it's recorded on the blockchain, there is no way to cancel it. If they are lucky, they may be able to reach out to the miner and get a portion returned. Probably just tough luck though.

user-the-name 5y ago
Unless you just get the devs to write it out of existence and fork the chain.

MichaelApproved 5y ago

I'm guessing you're also getting downvoted because sarcasm and rhetorical questions and not great ways of starting meaningful discussions.

system2 5y ago
Can't anyone ask question to HN Gods without fear of being ridiculed? I am also curious about this myself.
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  Yes you can, but that wasn't a geniune question.

exporectomy 5y ago

Reversing transactions is massive problem in finance in general. It causes losses for merchants in both physical shops and online sellers because there's no objective measure of whether a transaction was a mistake or not so it's begging to be abused for fraud. Even if a court decides, somebody still loses when both parties had different expectations. People have overpaid wages or social welfare payments taken back from them after they already assumed it was correct and spent it, and are now in a big debt. People accidentally sign contracts that require them to pay more than they expected. There's fraud where people buy an item online, then claim they never received it and get their payment refunded while keeping the item. Here's an example of traditional finance screwing someone over for making an obvious mistake. Where's this ability to reverse transactions when you need it? https://www.livemint.com/opinion/online-views/a-fascinating-case-about-paying-a-900-million-debt-by-mistake-11607602031675.html https://www.livemint.com/opinion/online-views/a-fascinating-... You're assuming there's some benevolent God who can arbitrate who's right and who's wrong. In reality, people get screwed by bad payment reversal decisions all the time and there's no objective way to decide in every case.

midev 5y ago
> You're assuming there's some benevolent God who can arbitrate who's right and who's wrong Literally nobody assumes this. Please don't invent strawmen. The point is, even with all the failings of the courts, different interpretations of language, and every other flaw, it's still better than having no recourse at all. > There's fraud where people buy an item online, then claim they never received it and get their payment refunded while keeping the item. And of course, the blockchain solves none of this. It just makes rectifying the problem far more difficult.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  How would any reversals be decided without a benevolent God? I've shown that traditional finance can't do it "correctly". Apparently smart contracts can't either. Courts can't because the law is sometimes ambiguous and unknown before it's tested in court. Traditional contracts can't because people get tricked by not reading the fine print. I think nobody can except an imaginary benevolent God. If you just call the boss of reversals and say "sorry I made a terrible mistake, please reverse the payment", how can he trust that you're not the fraudster yourself? Even in the case in this article, how can any 3rd party truly know that it was a mistake and not just someone pretending it was a mistake so they can get it back? Blockchain solves the problem of chargeback fraud. It's one specific class of fraud but it's solved by that technology even if other classes of fraud are created.

elif 5y ago

it varies from coin to coin. in limited cases you can perform another operation which makes the preceding operation illegal. in normal cases, not being able to cancel is the entire point of the technology.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

You can ask Buterik to roll it back for you. He did it once for the DAO guys, so worth a try. (Of course, that rollback also demonstrated that Ethereum is a centralised coin with a controlling entity, and that 'code is law' is just a lie, but that's another story)

baobabKoodaa 5y ago
No it didn't demonstrate that. Vitalik et al reached consensus for rolling back the DAO hack. A major reason why they reached consensus was that so many players had a vested interest in the rollback. If Vitalik had tried to push something unpopular, he wouldn't have been able to push it through, because - in contrast to your claims - Ethereum is not a centrally controlled blockchain.
- SamBam 5y ago
  I guess you'd better hope you're never on the wrong side, politically, from a majority of ETH miners. "This guy who we all hate now owns $100MM in ETH? Now he doesn't."
  - rattlesnakedave 5y ago
    Yeah, miners and node operators. That’s how this has always worked.
  - ludamad 5y ago
    Yeah they can always coordinate, but these things are never so clean. They'd also need to be convinced it wouldn't undermine the network faith in a way against their interests, beyond being a well hated figure. And that no fork would emerge reinstating the person (as their deed is far from hidden)
  - erulabs 5y ago
    This is also how nation states work. And it takes probably far fewer people, less time, and can be done in secrecy when the US wants to enact a sanction and freeze accounts than it does to hard-fork ethereum.

Geee 5y ago

You negotiate with the recipient of the transaction to return the money.

andruby 5y ago
The fee went to the miner, not the recipient of the transaction. So probably an anonymous mining setup that has little incentive to return $23M
davidcbc 5y ago
That sounds like a lot of trust to put on someone in a “trustless” system
- retrac 5y ago
  It's the exact same flaw as cash. If you mess up and send it to the wrong person in the mail or set it on fire, there is absolutely no recourse, unless there's someone to sue maybe. As long as you understand that I don't see the problem. I use cash a lot myself. Of course, we basically did invent the entire banking system to get away from the many downsides of literally lugging bags of gold around, like theft and loss without recourse.
  - davidcbc 5y ago
    Yeah, I hate it when I accidentally pay someone 6 orders of magnitude more than I meant to when I’m using cash. Just like cryptocurrency!
    - ric2b 5y ago
      Citibank managed to do it with USD and still hasn't gotten it back. Meanwhile in this case the miner gave back the money so maybe the tech isn't the issue?

dang 5y ago

Please don't go on about downvotes—this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If the downvotes were inappropriate, other users will usually correct them (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=corrective%20upvote https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), but off-topic, guidelines-breaking complaints like the one you added don't get garbage-collected when that happens, so they linger on, adding noise to the thread.

baby 5y ago

I'll answer even if it's rhetorical, but there are some blockchains (I used to work for one) that allow arbitrary state transitions as long as it's approved by an approved authority. Now, Ethereum has another way to fix this: forbid transactions that use a gas fee MUCH MUCH larger than the current average one.