59 ms·

Did I just lose half a million dollars?

638 points by olegious 5y ago

tartoran 5y ago
This whole thing is so complicated, I admit I don’t understand how 99% of these things work but, even if one has a good understanding, wouldn’t it be a good idea to run some dry runs with symbolic sums before going on with the whole sum? Even better, chunk it out in a few transactions, wait for each transaction to complete before proceeding further?
trizuz 5y ago
loa_in_ 5y ago
The infographic that's probably the source of it all: https://weth.io/img/WETH_04.gif https://weth.io/img/WETH_04.gif
epolanski 5y ago
It's cool how they all call for trusted middlewares yet proving that trustles technologies are something no one's really looking for.
MisterBiggs 5y ago
I wonder if it would be possible for wallets to look at a smart contract before a transaction and determine if your input will cause any kind of action or if you are just burning your coins.
coldtea 5y ago
>I would also be in favor of an EIP returning money to addresses who lost money because of these early mistakes. However, I can see that this can be a contentious one, so the community and the success of Ethereum should always be first. (...) I am also sorry that this was a negative event for the perception of cryptocurrencies. The last thing I would want in this world :( These are not the words of somebody who lost half a million dollars, who in a regular non-crypto situation with a fellow person, a bank, a credit card, and so on, would be fuming at the mouth. These are the worlds of a true believer, to a degree that this is cult-level scary considering the amount involved. >A life-changing lesson for me Doesn't seem like it was...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sp332 5y ago
> You are now the 265th person to do this but you contributed 45% of all the WETH in the contract.
- magicjosh 5y ago
  Proof here on the blockchain: https://etherscan.io/token/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead9083c756cc2?a=0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead9083c756cc2 https://etherscan.io/token/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead90...
- Gigachad 5y ago
  265 people made a mistake which deleted their money. How is crypto still so broken at a fundamental level after over a decade of work.
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    265 people made a mistake in this particular way deleting their money. Given the amount of cryptobank scams and hacks, lost wallets etc I would not dare have any significant value in cryptos. Like the people that have made them self a fortune on crypto need to understand that it is psychology a different thing to put fresh money into the system from just extracting profit made from almost nothing.
  - neuronic 5y ago
    The incentive of any crypto/web3 app is short-term greed and not building a trustworthy system.
  - posterboy 5y ago
    I've lost bills before, forgot to check change, that was all on me.
    - sp332 5y ago
      At least in that case someone actually got the money. In this case there was a valid transaction to a valid address that no one owns and no one can access.
ggm 5y ago
It's not money until it's in a federally recognised financial institution. If it's bearer bonds, or bits, you can burn it. At least with banknotes if you photograph the serial numbers you can try to reclaim the value, but with bits.. it's complicated. Of course in principle you can reverse this. Nobody is going to want to do the codework to recreate this wealth, it would cost a lot more than $500k and has consequences. I'm told some models include a way to un"oops" the signature chain but they beg so many questions. OK. Let's be honest, the entire model begs many questions. I am sure people here will use this to both back, and belabour Etherium and contracts (as I have done, I'm not unaware how partisan I am on this) Mark Latham, the former leader of the Labor party of Australia (he is an utterly repellent man otherwise in my view, but I admire a good writer) has a fine way with words, and referred to his opponents as "a conga line of suck holes" [0]. I've always felt this is applicable to the chain. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Latham#Labor_member_of_Parliament https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Latham#Labor_member_of_...
- ciupicri 5y ago
  > At least with banknotes if you photograph the serial numbers you can try to reclaim the value In what country?
  - ggm 5y ago
    In many countries: try Google for "recover destroyed banknote" search.
    - ciupicri 5y ago
      Could you be more specific please? Cause you said based on photographs. Otherwise national banks usually ask for more than half of the note. At least in that's how they do it in Germany and Romania.
      - ggm 5y ago
        Your point is clearer to me now. No, you can't literally recover money simply because you have a photograph of it. There is a recovery path for damaged and destroyed money, highly dependent on the serial number (which is why 50% of the note is typically requested) Here's the Australian rules after a significant bushfire. Partial re-imbursement for up to 80% loss of the face of the note. https://au.sports.yahoo.com/bushfires-burnt-your-cash-heres-what-to-do-003616395.html https://au.sports.yahoo.com/bushfires-burnt-your-cash-heres-... The point I was trying to make is that the actual value of the exchange is not only visible, its entirely visible. The specific value can be proved. If this was analogous in real world currency, Claim for loss would be possible.
ssiddharth 5y ago
In case you’re wondering what happened, from the thread: 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. For contracts that want to only work with ERC-20 tokens, you use WETH, which comes from a contract that takes 1 eth and gives you 1 WETH. A known problem with ERC-20 tokens is that transferring them to a contract that isn't made to access them is equivalent to burning them. You should almost never transfer ERC-20 to a smart contract. You instead use approve to give the smart contract permission to withdraw, then call the function you want to receive and tell it to make the withdraw (the contract will internally call transferFrom).
- rob_c 5y ago
  So to paraphrase. Broken technology with serious bugs Therefore anyone looking to do anything other than gain speculative wealth should stay well away. Another one born every minute...
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  So it's super-bad UX where radically different interaction patterns are used for what are to the user similar kinds of interaction, creating a trap.
  - T0Bi 5y ago
    The thing is that there are enough frontends using this smart contract where you can simply chose 'WETH to ETH' and you'll get the right transaction. For whatever reason this person thought it'd be a great idea to interact with the smart contract directly. This is possible and fine if you either know what you're doing or read the smart contract beforehand. This user unfortunately did neither.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > The thing is that there are enough frontends using this smart contract where you can simply chose 'WETH to ETH' and you'll get the right transaction. For whatever reason this person thought it'd be a great idea to interact with the smart contract directly. Getting out of the supposed user-opacity of legalese to something that was safe and reasonable for a non-elite-priesthood users to understand, trust, and interact with directly without an intermediary was, I thought, the whole allure of smart contracts over using the old-fashioned dumb kind to manage transactions and business relations.
jcun4128 5y ago
I did something similar on a thankfully tiny scale. Was screwing around with different cheap coins and did something like sending Reddcoin to Litecoin and yeah I just lost it. But it was pennies. For more context I was messing around with Shapeshift back in 2018 which you generate a deposit and withdraw address for some crypto currency pair eg. LTC to Doge. I messed up this process.
wruza 5y ago
Is this a motivation issue with crypto? Here is what I mean. Centralized systems work like a web of tunnels - you can’t send “nowhere” or make a huge mistake, but if your part of a tunnel gets shut for some reason, you’re locked. Decentralized ones are like an endless empty void with point-like islands of ownership in it. You can send anywhere, but make one mistake and it’s over. Now pepper this with our usual issues with code correctness and debugging. The issue is that people do like tunnels because they feel safe, and empty voids are scary. This incentives to still build and use tunnels around this void, which makes “crypto”-ness just an implementation detail not worth using as is by the masses. Afaiu, this happens for two reasons: 1, the usual, people tend to forget assertions. 2, the new one, crypto institutions who make contracts are incentivized to omit assertions because runtime now costs serious money. They are like factories where there is no rule of safety yet. Is the above correct, or is it a true half a million dollars mistake? You can’t trust node_modules as it seems, how can you trust piles of contracts code when there is no support, no takedowns of bad versions and no easily accessible (and decentralized?) audit? Also, could a type system help in this case?
- rosndo 5y ago
  >Centralized systems work like a web of tunnels - you can’t send “nowhere” or make a huge mistake You can totally make a 1 digit typo while making a bank transfer that results in all the money being lost. Perhaps you’ll recover it after years of litigation, but that’s really not guaranteed. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/dec/07/i-lost-my-193000-inheritance-with-one-wrong-digit-on-my-sort-code https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/dec/07/i-lost-my-1930... E: downvoted by upset bankers? :)
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    But at least in that case, it's possible to get the money back. In this case, isn't the money absolutely, totally, 100% gone forever?
    - rosndo 5y ago
      Sort of? You could appeal to the Ethereum developers, they could reasonably recover these funds without upsetting anyone too much by just refunding all WETH transactions sent to that contract. (This is the root of the spiritual disagreement between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic) Of course you’re more likely to succeed when it’s real money and the other party has to worry about getting sued. But even in the case of a bank transfer, the other party can abscond with your money and it’ll be extremely hard to recover since law enforcement probably won’t help you and (especially international) litigation costs can quickly render such an endeavor far too expensive.
ddoice 5y ago
I lost 4.5K transfering USDT from Binance to Coinbase From time to time I check if the money is still there. The last time I asked Coinbase support they didn't even bother to answer me. I was not investing, one of my contractors unilaterally decided to pay me in crypto.
- rwmj 5y ago
  > I was not investing, one of my contractors unilaterally decided to pay me in crypto. Why didn't you tell him that you wanted to be paid in real money?
  - toomanydoubts 5y ago
    Because then they would say "ok, here's crypto".
    - noitpmeder 5y ago
      That's not usually how contracts work (in the sense of the actual law, not this smart contract bullshit).
      - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
        Try enforcing anything overseas..
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - aqaq 5y ago
        If I told you in the contract that I'd pay you in iphones, I'm pretty sure you would have to accept them as payment?
  - ddoice 5y ago
    Yup, their response was crypto or nothing
londons_explore 5y ago
This is really a problem to be solved by etherium clients. Instead of just saying "what address should we send this to?", they should have code which allows a "preview" of what will happen after the transfer. After all, all the logic is there on the Blockchain, so the client can easily pop up a warning saying "what you are trying to send will be permanently unspendable. You can't so this without the --i-want-to-destroy-my-coins flag". The preview logic could recognise various common smart contracts to give the user a better idea what the spending conditions for each are too.
- ipnon 5y ago
  What's frustrating is there are already many decentralized exchanges handling billions of dollars a day that perfectly solve this problem. If you insist on making bank deposits by tunneling into their servers and writing C, don't complain when they can't find your money later. Use the app!
  - Adrox 5y ago
    He seems to have used MetaMask! He was not writing any code or “tunneling into their servers”! Unless MetaMask is not recomended anymore and I should use centralized websites that I have no idea what code they are running? Even my bank that has a REST API would probably tell me where the money went, instead of “it’s gone”.
    - mattdesl 5y ago
      Interacting with a contract by sending it tokens (and having no idea what the outcome will be) is about as risky behaviour as you can imagine, and is quite a lot like using a low level API to circumvent the guardrails put in place by typical payment processors. Certainly client and wallet UX can be dramatically improved to mitigate these problems. And education more generally about the risks of interacting with smart contracts, which there are many.
      - Adrox 5y ago
londons_explore 5y ago
No value was lost here... Since everyone can see this is unspendable, It's simply a donation to all other users in the form of burning coins and increasing the value of all other coins.
- withinboredom 5y ago
  That’s like saying “oops I burned my house down. Everyone can see it’s unspendable but at least it increased my neighbors value of their house because there are less houses.” Houses (and crypto) are worth actual cash. Burning them doesn’t increase the value of others in any meaningful way.
  - tinco 5y ago
    No, a burned down house can be rebuilt and burning down a house actually increases entropy in the universe. It is a clear destruction of value. Burning Ethereum irreplaceably removes it from the pool. Ethereum is not inherently valuable, the Eth is just a token representing a contribution to the network, that you do not redeem it just makes everyone's Ethereum a little bit more valuable. This is also why crypto is worth such ridiculously large amounts. Almost everyone is "HODLing", not redeeming their ETH for money, so the Ethereum that is in circulation is more valuable.
- sumedh 5y ago
  > No value was lost here... But he warmed the planet for no reason.
- rob_c 5y ago
  Sounds like a good way of inflating a bogus coin that will cause a rush on it...
cliftonk 5y ago
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/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead9083c756cc2 https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead...
- system2 5y ago
  Crypto gets dumber by the day.
- captn3m0 5y ago
  What’s the other 20b worth of eth for?
  - cliftonk 5y ago
    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)
  - dylkil 5y ago
    people send eth to get weth back, weth is an erc20 wrapper for eth - wrapped eth
tomcooks 5y ago
Why worry about mainstream crypto adoption to the point you want to remove the freedoms that brought you there in the first place?
westcoast330 5y ago
The future of currency ladies and gentlemen. This money is literally gone. Unrecoverable. Like he took the money out to a barrel and burned it. Only he didn't get any warmth out of it in exchange.
- tsujp 5y ago
  Ether isn’t intended to be used as a monetary currency like a dollar (reasonable stable). Its purpose is to pay for EVM instructions which are priced in gas. This is like saying because shoes happen to be worth money (sneakers/trainers) and because people happen to speculate on the price of shoes that the future of money is shoes. Bitcoin claims to be currency, Ether (used to pay for execution fees on Ethereum) does not.
- yoavm 5y ago
  Considering the emissions of all proof-of-work-based Blockchains, he probably warmed all of us.
  - xzjis 5y ago
    Since I'm mining ETH when I'm not gaming, he maybe warmed me.
  - vmception 5y ago
    thats pretty funny but for anyone else that wants to learn about this stuff, proof of work blockchains use the same energy whether transactions occur or not ironically this seemingly would actually bolster the argument against Proof of Work, but its probably more convenient that people are easily swayed towards inaccurate arguments
  - noduerme 5y ago
    ah. Such an easy setup, it was a sure thing I'd be second to the party.
- noduerme 5y ago
  At least the rest of the planet got a little warmer /s
s5300 5y ago
Eh, as somebody who flubbed 7 $ figures in crypto after 2 weeks of extreme sleep deprivation… He’ll be okay ;)
- Seattle3503 5y ago
  Mind sharing your story?
- rob_c 5y ago
  F
YATA0 5y ago
Crypto Darwinism is a real thing. Insane to see that amount of money just disappear. Literally just poof, it's gone. Not "gone" like someone stole it, because that money didn't disappear, the thief has it now. This money literally went into a digital blackhole.
- nikanj 5y ago
  The price of eth is surprisingly easy to calculate, with the coin price being (new dollars people are willing to invest into crypto)/(amount of coins in circulation). There are no pesky externalities like "amount of EBITDA per outstanding eth", every single dollar is coming from someone buying in. This reduced the denominator, thus increasing the value of eth.
  - YATA0 5y ago
    Is this a GPT-3 generated comment? Did you reply to the wrong thread?
  - cuteboy19 5y ago
    The EBITDA of eth is exactly 0, actually.
    - 0x64 5y ago
      Depends on what you count as earnings; Ethereum did $9.9b in transaction fees and tips alone last year. [1] https://stark.mirror.xyz/q3OnsK7mvfGtTQ72nfoxLyEV5lfYOqUfJIoKBx7BG1I https://stark.mirror.xyz/q3OnsK7mvfGtTQ72nfoxLyEV5lfYOqUfJIo...
      - cuteboy19 5y ago
        That's the cost the network pays to miners/core devs. So EBITDA comes out very negative
        0x64 5y ago
ddtaylor 5y ago
I love how everyone assumes that the ETH blockchain is immutable and there is nothing that can happen to undo any of this. Did everyone simply forget when the Dao had a contract bug and the ETH devs literally just rolled back the transaction?
- aemreunal 5y ago
  So crypto is immutable, "code is law", decentralized, whatever, until people need to roll back transactions and use centralized exchanges because "they already solved these issues"? Seems like a whole lot of global warming just to re-invent a terrible imitation of banking...
  - neuronic 5y ago
    > decentralized After reading Moxie's blog post on web3 [1] I feel it is a stretch to call anything Ehtereum-based decentralized anymore when this many applications use Alchemy or Infura as providers for their Ethereum nodes. [1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
    - dandanua 5y ago
      It's not just nodes. It's also - exchanges - mining pools - mixers - oracles Also, core devs and all stable cryptos are "centralized" by definition. This whole ecosystem is just cancer to a traditional society. It's not an evolution.
      - xtracto 5y ago
        Cancer like in the health issue? Or cancer like how Open Source (GPL) was a cancer back in the 2000s?
    - e12e 5y ago
      Thank you for that link, I see it was posted to hn, but gained little traction. It certainly puts words to my feelings around current "crypto" trends as someone (probably like moxie) that still remember the first wave of cypherpunks[1] and dreams of digital currencies. It feels strange when a lot of smart people insists on something that's obviously false in a practical, real-world sense - and it's nice to see someone else shine a light on that, and explain in simple, correct terms what's actually going on. I wonder if there are any emerging systems that are more likely to realise the idea (ideals) of digital currencies and smart contracts? I had hopes for etherum, but now I'm thinking that if we'll ever get there, it'd be in the next generation (call it third generation, bitcoin being first, etherum second - and earlier things generation zero). I'm thinking it would be proof-of-stake, and somehow viable as real peer to peer, or split in a more sane way between infrastructure and "wallets". [1] See eg this for a summary and some pointers https://nakamoto.com/the-cypherpunks/ https://nakamoto.com/the-cypherpunks/
StringyBob 5y ago
Having watched cryptocurrency from a distance via HN etc. for over a decade, I thought I had a general understanding, but this made me realize I wasn’t aware of what smart contracts really were (just looked up solidity today and details of The DAO hack). The potential for irreversible losses, fraud and security holes are much bigger than I realized. This also lead me to this video which will now be my ‘go to’ recommendation for anyone asking about crypto and NFTs - it’s a general critique and social commentary of the issues with crypto - not specifically about this case, but I thought excellent, and the first time I think I’ve watched a 2hr vid on YouTube ‘Line goes up’ - https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g
- richardburton 5y ago
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    Wait, you're actually comparing crypto to a symphony? Is the orchestra a bunch of first graders who have never played an instrument? =)
  - noduerme 5y ago
    What could be more of a rat's nest than the crypto scams? As soon as it became possible for anyone to create a token it just became a race to the bottom. It's the ultimate recepticle for scammers.
    - rvz 5y ago
      > As soon as it became possible for anyone to create a token it just became a race to the bottom. Exactly. All enabled and caused by Ethereum. First the ICOs, then anyone can create their own scam ERC-20 tokens, The DAO (which got hacked and hard forked to reverse the funds), NFTs (which have nothing to do with ownership), which once you scale up all of that it basically becomes unusable due to the 'gas fees' for every operation. Spend $200 to swap $1 worth of tokens using dapps like Uniswap. One can go as far as to say that the Ethereum logo is literally a pyramid. Now what does that tell us? A pyramid scheme? who knows. From the start, they are probably trying to tell us that they know it is a scam. At this point, everyone will eventually jump on the scheme itself anyway even when everyone knows it is a scam.
invalidusernam3 5y ago
If I was not 100% confident in performing this transaction (which I would never be) I would send $1 as a test before sending the other $499,999. Is there a technical reason preventing one doing a test transaction first?
- daviddoran 5y ago
  Even then, whenever you’re dealing with large amounts there’s risk. E.g., early on in Bitcoin’s development a user lost a lot of Bitcoin by making a small test transfer, not realising that the change (their remaining balance) was sent to a new address in their wallet. But they were running a bootable Linux Distro from a CD and didn’t save the wallet back to a USB or other permanent storage. So they’ll never have access to those keys.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Ah, that sounds like lovely use case for average users with higher than 0 chance of blackouts... Right timing bad design(sensible one) and it is all gone... So in the end regular user probably ends up doing everything on centralized wallets or exchanges and then those are likely to do some off-chain book keeping as that is cheaper... Brining us back to banking...
  - ciupicri 5y ago
    How was this possible, for the change to be sent to a new address? If I understand correctly what you're saying is that the account was split in two: one part went to the wanted destination and the rest to an unwanted destination.
    - ripply 5y ago
      Yes, this is how Bitcoin is designed and has worked from the beginning. The problem is his wallet did save the private key for the change address he just didn’t save the wallet, so it was lost - the changed address wasn’t unwanted, it was wanted, it just didn’t get saved. I believe early Bitcoin wallets generated addresses randomly so you couldn’t recover everything from a seed and had to save your wallet.
yumraj 5y ago
I understand ETH, but WTF is WETH?
- trenchgun 5y ago
  WETH is WTF ETF.
- halfdan 5y ago
  There's a page explaining it with that exact title: https://weth.io/ https://weth.io/ Can't say I understand it now after reading it though.
- proto-n 5y ago
  Eth is the native token, WETH is an ERC20 token (token creted by a contract implementing the ERC20 interface). Many applications don't want to handle these separately, so they only accept ERC20 tokens. WETH is Eth wrapped in a token contract (can be warpped or unwrapped 1:1). Think of it as similar to Java's int vs Integer.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - kilroy123 5y ago
    But why?
    - sethaurus 5y ago
      Lots of different things live on the Ethereum blockchain: there's ETH itself, which we might call "raw money", and then there are abstract tokens (of both the fungible and non-fungible sort). To make a programming analogy, there are lots of systems which are "generic" over tokens — they can deal with many kinds of token, as long as it's the standard shape. Raw money doesn't have this shape, so WETH is a very simple "wrapper token". You can trade 1 ETH for 1 WETH and then use it in some token-compatible system. The exchange rate for WETH is fixed by the (very short) contract, and it's supposed to be simple to trade money for tokens or vice versa — although given this poor sod's story, it's arguably not that simple after all.
quickthrower2 5y ago
Could there be a big warning where you type “IAmAnIdiot” to continue for common mistakes like this? Built into all wallets like MetaMask.
dandanua 5y ago
No, those ethereum coins are just "wrapped" forever /s There are many more cases of this, someone else burned $300k half a year ago, in the same way.
fabian2k 5y ago
So I don't know how smart contracts are implemented at all. But I would have expected this to work more like a statically typed programming language. If this particular address doesn't handle this kind of input, it should not be possible to send it.
- noitpmeder 5y ago
  It is statically typed, as in this input fired off the WETH implementation that runs a no-op and returns void.
yashg 5y ago
Banks suck! Death to the central banks! Down with fiat! Code is law! All hail the future of finance.
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  Cryptocurrency is fiat, in that unlike commodity money, they are not backed by anything
0x_rs 5y ago
I used crypto in the past, starting a decade ago, but absolutely cannot wrap my head around these new-age concepts such as smart contracts, dozen ETH flavors and whatnot. They seem blackboxes to me no matter how much I read about them. The fact you have to use a withdrawal function instead of the reverse operation used for the initial conversion seems a pretty severe design overlook since they're burned forever this way.
- xtracto 5y ago
  I still use crypto and grok smart contracts alright. But exactly this shit of wrapped tokens, same tokens in different blockchains and whatnot is a recipe for disaster.
- dylkil 5y ago
  If you dont know what you are doing you should never interact with a smart contract directly. People like the guy who lost 500k should be using the frontends which interact with the contracts properly. https://wrapeth.com/ https://wrapeth.com/
  - icedistilled 5y ago
    it's like telling someone never to deal with physical cash or dollar bills, only use credit cards.
    - dylkil 5y ago
      no its like telling someone to not craft their own payload and call the api directly. Use the front end which handles that for you.
noitpmeder 5y ago
Can he even claim this as a loss on his tax returns? My guess is no...
samarama 5y ago
That’s like dropping half a million dollar in USD and your account number in front of the bank at night when it’s closed and expecting the bank to credit it to your account.
- dorkwood 5y ago
  What would actually happen, in this case, assuming the bank found the money? I feel like they'd most likely have to report it, rather than destroy it.
in3d 5y ago
It's not a great situation that this is possible but you could make a similar error for the same amount of money in your brokerage account and also have no recourse. It could be a typo in the ticker symbol, you could buy an option for the wrong month, you could buy instead of selling, you could enter an extra zero, you could not notice a multiplier for the futures, you could let a physical delivery future expire, etc. Using Interactive Brokers or other brokers with advanced user interfaces, it's even possible to turn off confirmations or do most things with just a keyboard or through an API. I don't see this situation as significantly different.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  But it is. If you buy the wrong asset, you can sell it back and get most of your money back. There is a low friction “undo” button. No such thing in crypto.
  - in3d 5y ago
    Buy a penny stock or an illiquid option and you certainly won't get most of your money back. In addition, there are many other hidden risks. For example, you could have the broker increase the margin rates overnight leading to forced liquidations or the stock could be halted and impossible to trade for months. You can even end up owing more than your whole account is worth if margin is enabled.
    - rich_sasha 5y ago
      Right, if I’m unlucky then sure, something like this can happen. But I’d have to be really unlucky and/or careless to really lose 20%+ of my money. Whereas with crypto it’s so easy to lose 100% plus gas fees, all the time.
  - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
    Options work differently, you can lose all your money.
    - 5y ago
blastonico 5y ago
The first transaction must always be with a very tiny fraction of that money. Assuming you know something may cost a lot.
capableweb 5y ago
Since no one seems to think about how this could have prevented, here is a simple way, which I've applied to lots of things in life, not just cryptocurrency transfers: - If you're making a transfer somewhere with a large amount, do a small transfer first and verify it's working. Confirm at the receiving end before moving big sums. - If you're calling a contract, try it with a small amount first. Verify the parameters multiple times, and verify the return values multiple times. - If you're doing something with a huge sum of money, do it in steps instead of all-at-once. Fees won't be as big since you're already dealing with a huge sum of money anyways - Verify verify and verify that everything went alright with the small sum before trying to do something with a big sum - If you're tired, don't do it. Wait until you got some sleep - If you're rushed, don't do it. Wait until you're not rushed, have a tea and think about it - When in doubt, verify it and don't be tired - If you're not an expert, have someone who is do verification above for you
- srcreigh 5y ago
  Sounds great. I'm sure there's checks in place to ensure the smart contract can't have different logic for small amounts and large amounts. Right?
  - vmception 5y ago
    There are many ways to check that, yes. But the best way is to use a trusted contract. The other ways are pretty absurd burdens to put on a user.
- rrrhys 5y ago
  - If it's complex and not automated, make a checklist, print it, check it off line by line.
- dfgdfgasqqw 5y ago
  > - If you're not an expert, have someone who is do verification above for you I would modify this to > - If you're not an expert, have someone who is do verification above in addition to you (not instead of you)
- 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
irthomasthomas 5y ago
How did this just drop off the front page so quickly with 206 points in 6 hours? Anyway, I thought this comment by the OP was interesting... I thought a test transaction of sending ETH and getting WETH back was enough proof. My mistake was that I made an assumption about the reverse direction. Didn't see anywhere (including the official site) that we shouldn't directly interact with the contract and we have to use a dapp :/
- jb1991 5y ago
  I’m just guessing, but maybe it was flagged. By multiple users. That would not affect the vote count I don’t think, but it would affect its ranking on the page.
- dorkwood 5y ago
  Aren't posts with more comments than points downweighted?
MrPatan 5y ago
Sure, the tech is not perfect. But it will get better over time, not worse. Soon there may be a "good version" of it that replaces a big chunk of anything financial and financializes another chunk of everything else. Or maybe not. I understand assigning a low probability to that event, but the upside is so big that it's still a bit weird to be just a hater and not make a lottery-ticket-sized investment. Or I guess the chance of being able to tell randos on the internet "I told you so and they never fooled me!" in a few years if it fails must be a similar-sized reward in utility.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  It won't get better. It's been here for years, it's not got better during that time. There is no sign that will change. There's no need for it to get better, because there are already enough fools using it.
- zucker42 5y ago
  Well the argument people would make for not buying is that, similar to buying a lottery ticket, "investing" in ETH has negative expected value (or at least EV less than opportunity cost).
- parksy 5y ago
  There's a huge swing against literally anything crypto-related at the moment. I feel a big part of it is that big gaming companies pricked their ears up on the idea of NFTs and being able to own a marketplace sipping the cream from billions of microtransactions in realtime. Serious gamers really, really don't like that idea, having already been screwed down by DLC's, Pre-ordering, buggy and unfinished games, "seasons", "surprise mechanics" (literally gambling for virtual items). The general consensus has spun around to being that anything crypto is a scam, elaborate ponzi/pyramid scheme, etc, etc. Bored Apes is a bit silly, NFTs could technically be used for so much more but that would require the right platform, and legislative support (ie the backing of society) to have meaning. I think the cat is out of the bag tech-wise. I think you're right that improvements will be made - blockchain / distributed ledger / whatever you want simply exists now, and I doubt it will ever stop existing. Ignoring the tidal wave of criticism it faces now, some valid, some not, it has inherent technological advantages in cases where trustless, distributed, peer to peer transactional events need to be rigidly catalogued and visible to all participants. I also think most of these positive advancements that will change the fabric of society yada yada, will require the profit motive to be eliminated completely, where maintaining a blockchain becomes something done for ethical or moral reasons like folding@home rather than hoping to ride the next whale's massive pump. It's kinda sad how desparate we all are for riches, billions of us but the financial incentive is the best motivator we could come up with. But I digress. Prepare to be shouted down over the next few months / years for saying anything positive about any blockchainish-tech, it's all pretty well tarred with the same brush as NFTs and dodgey doge market manipulation at this point. It'll calm down eventually. It is what it is. Probably a well deserved critique of a concept that is still at a point equivalent to computers in the 80s vs smartphones today. Give it time. People will find a proper use for it.
jasfi 5y ago
This is why people say the UI for crypto/Web 3 sucks.
- Sargos 5y ago
  This wasn't really a UI problem as this was someone manually calling functions meant only for software developers. No users would ever do this as they are using apps which abstract all of this away and you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get into this situation. Anyone can hurt themselves using tools they don't understand carelessly.
greenSunglass 5y ago
why would you want to "wrap" Ethereum?
- vmception 5y ago
  the native asset of the virtual machine lacks the expanded primitives that people are accustomed in the other assets they've created wrapping it lets it inherit those primitives for use in other programs more easily many programs handle the wrapping and unwrapping just-in-time behind the scenes, using a chained method call to the same contract OP used Its pretty hard to mess up, but OP managed to
egypturnash 5y ago
jdhzzz 5y ago
Obligatory "Happy Fun Ball" reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmqeZl8OI2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmqeZl8OI2M
nickjj 5y ago
Here's an unrelated but related question: How do you store your wallet / private keys where you would be comfortable storing an amount of money that's important to you? It feels like a bunch of consumer grade options we have are kind of flaky: Flash drives are extremely undependable. I've had a few fail to read after sitting in a closet for a year. SSDs can supposedly have data loss pretty quickly if left unpowered (days to months). DVDs have decent lasting power (I have some CDs that still work after 15 years) but this makes me nervous because it's so susceptible to damage. HDDs also make me think what would happen if it's not powered on for 5-10+ years (it's mechanical, does it use some type of oil internally to keep friction down?). Putting it on the cloud seems risky, even with encryption at rest and now we need to backup the encryption keys. I guess tape is still our best bet? I would also think if you have a decent amount of crypto you'd likely want to have 3 backups in your apartment along with 3 offsite backups, perhaps lock boxes in a few different banks in different towns (or even hundreds of miles apart). Basically it still feels like a huge pain in the butt to keep digital currency secure and available. The more backups you have, the more risk you have around being compromised but the less backups you have the more susceptible you are to data loss and losing everything.
- topranks 5y ago
  While “being your own bank”, aka keeping all your savings in a shoe box under the bed, is idiotic, you can simply write the seed phrases down in ink on paper. So you don’t necessarily need some digital storage to keep them.
- ur-whale 5y ago
  Jameson Lopp has a ton of resources on the topic (bitcoin centric, but lots of it translates immediately to other cryptos): https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information/security.html https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information/security.html
- CydeWeys 5y ago
  Paper backups are the best option for this. Private keys are simple enough that a whole wallet can be printed to a single piece of paper using an OCR-friendly font.
mtnGoat 5y ago
Newer contracts, if built well, have rescue mechanisms built in.
- awhitby 5y ago
  It's notable that after hundreds of years of experience in writing contracts, real world legal systems still rely on courts to interpret them in a reasonable and equitable manner because we cannot possibly anticipate every edge case and build in every rescue mechanism. Smart contracts really shouldn't be called contracts - it's a misleading analogy.
  - mtnGoat 5y ago
    Smart is laughable, they are just functions that live on someone else’s computer. ;)
_hudj 5y ago
[dead]
voidfunc 5y ago
Ouch hard lesson to learn. I burned some ETH earlier this year trying to buy SHIB for shits and giggles. This is a problem that needs to be figured out before crypto can go mainstream.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  The lesson being "crypto is insane garbage that nobody should touch with a ten-foot pole".
booleandilemma 5y ago
Luckily I’m not smart enough to lose that much money so quickly.
- runeks 5y ago
  Nor rich enough
  - booleandilemma 5y ago
    Someone’s offended :)
    - runeks 5y ago
      ;)
fredsmith42 5y ago
I don't know anything about crypto. Why can't he contact someone on the receiving end of the transaction and say "I really messed up, please transfer this money back to me?". I know crypto transactions can't be undone, but a new transaction of equal value in the reverse direction could be done, right? And if not, why the hell not?
- chrisshroba 5y ago
  This is true if the recipient is a person, but in this case it is a "Smart contract" which means it has particular programmed behavior and cannot just be asked to do something for ethical reasons. If it is not programmed to return money, it can't return money, and if it is not programmed to be reprogrammable, then it can't be reprogrammed to help this person.
  - icedistilled 5y ago
    how "smart" is a contract that will delivers good to non-existent entities. How "smart" is a contract that is actually a piece of code that's riddled with footguns? Calling these things "smart" contracts was the joke of the century.
- runeks 5y ago
  > And if not, why the hell not? Because he sent funds to a contract (a program) and not a person (a private key). The operation of the given contract (the actual program) cannot be altered, which is useful in the sense that you can inspect the contract code and make sure that it does what you want with the funds you send to it.
- jb3689 5y ago
  It is truly mind-boggling to me that funds can just effectively vanish in the system with no sense of recourse. And that no one thought this could go awry
  - vmception 5y ago
    Funds being inaccessible contribute to the scarcity of everyone else’s funds Just don't let it happen to you Thats the game! People like it, it goes awry upwards!
wutwutwutwut 5y ago
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
TacticalCoder 5y ago
I have literally zero clue as to how that ETH/WETH smart contract work but... Why the heck did the guy not first did a test with 1 000 USD worth of coins instead of 500 000 USD? Once he sees everything is cool with 1 000 USD, he sends the rest. Sounds like 101 to me.
echopurity 5y ago
nextlevelwizard 5y ago
To be fair OP in question did not lose half a million dollars. There is no proof he could have exchnaged all that ETH into dollars.
- neoromantique 5y ago
  500k in ETH is nothing liquidity wise.
- CamelCaseName 5y ago
  Look, I hate cryptocurrency as much as the average HN commenter, but I think at this point it should painfully clear that there is plenty of liquidity in crypto. $500K in ETH is really not that much anymore.
norswap 5y ago
Seems fishy to me when he says "I just sent ETH to the contract to get WETH" because this is assuredly not how it works. You have to call the `deposit` function of the smart contract (transfering ETH with it indeed). And to withdraw your WETH as ETH, you call `withdraw`. These calls can be made from here (power user interface! not recommended - use Uniswap instead): https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead9083c756cc2#writeContract https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead... The source code of the contract is here: https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead9083c756cc2#code https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead...
- conroydave 5y ago
  are you sure the deposit function isnt automatically called?
  - norswap 5y ago
    It is, see the comment of vmception above.
- vmception 5y ago
  Thank you! Finally a code discussion here instead of all this pearl clutching hysteria. So, this is all about the ‘payable’ method, which means it is triggered by the native asset of the virtual machine. If you look closely you’ll see there is a default anonymous function with ‘payable’ accessor method which calls the deposit() method
  - norswap 5y ago
    Oh duh! Thanks for pointing that out, I forgot about that, and I really should have known better!
reaperducer 5y ago
$500,000 is a lot of money. He should get in touch with his banker, either in person, on the phone, or online. If that doesn't work, escalate to the appropriate regulatory agency. Oh, wait... crypto.

638 points by olegious 5y ago

This whole thing is so complicated, I admit I don’t understand how 99% of these things work but, even if one has a good understanding, wouldn’t it be a good idea to run some dry runs with symbolic sums before going on with the whole sum? Even better, chunk it out in a few transactions, wait for each transaction to complete before proceeding further?

trizuz 5y ago

loa_in_ 5y ago

The infographic that's probably the source of it all: https://weth.io/img/WETH_04.gif https://weth.io/img/WETH_04.gif

epolanski 5y ago

It's cool how they all call for trusted middlewares yet proving that trustles technologies are something no one's really looking for.

MisterBiggs 5y ago

I wonder if it would be possible for wallets to look at a smart contract before a transaction and determine if your input will cause any kind of action or if you are just burning your coins.

coldtea 5y ago

>I would also be in favor of an EIP returning money to addresses who lost money because of these early mistakes. However, I can see that this can be a contentious one, so the community and the success of Ethereum should always be first. (...) I am also sorry that this was a negative event for the perception of cryptocurrencies. The last thing I would want in this world :( These are not the words of somebody who lost half a million dollars, who in a regular non-crypto situation with a fellow person, a bank, a credit card, and so on, would be fuming at the mouth. These are the worlds of a true believer, to a degree that this is cult-level scary considering the amount involved. >A life-changing lesson for me Doesn't seem like it was...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sp332 5y ago

> You are now the 265th person to do this but you contributed 45% of all the WETH in the contract.

magicjosh 5y ago
Proof here on the blockchain: https://etherscan.io/token/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead9083c756cc2?a=0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead9083c756cc2 https://etherscan.io/token/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead90...
Gigachad 5y ago
265 people made a mistake which deleted their money. How is crypto still so broken at a fundamental level after over a decade of work.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  265 people made a mistake in this particular way deleting their money. Given the amount of cryptobank scams and hacks, lost wallets etc I would not dare have any significant value in cryptos. Like the people that have made them self a fortune on crypto need to understand that it is psychology a different thing to put fresh money into the system from just extracting profit made from almost nothing.
- neuronic 5y ago
  The incentive of any crypto/web3 app is short-term greed and not building a trustworthy system.
- posterboy 5y ago
  I've lost bills before, forgot to check change, that was all on me.
  - sp332 5y ago
    At least in that case someone actually got the money. In this case there was a valid transaction to a valid address that no one owns and no one can access.

ggm 5y ago

It's not money until it's in a federally recognised financial institution. If it's bearer bonds, or bits, you can burn it. At least with banknotes if you photograph the serial numbers you can try to reclaim the value, but with bits.. it's complicated. Of course in principle you can reverse this. Nobody is going to want to do the codework to recreate this wealth, it would cost a lot more than $500k and has consequences. I'm told some models include a way to un"oops" the signature chain but they beg so many questions. OK. Let's be honest, the entire model begs many questions. I am sure people here will use this to both back, and belabour Etherium and contracts (as I have done, I'm not unaware how partisan I am on this) Mark Latham, the former leader of the Labor party of Australia (he is an utterly repellent man otherwise in my view, but I admire a good writer) has a fine way with words, and referred to his opponents as "a conga line of suck holes" [0]. I've always felt this is applicable to the chain. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Latham#Labor_member_of_Parliament https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Latham#Labor_member_of_...

ciupicri 5y ago
> At least with banknotes if you photograph the serial numbers you can try to reclaim the value In what country?
- ggm 5y ago
  In many countries: try Google for "recover destroyed banknote" search.
  - ciupicri 5y ago
    Could you be more specific please? Cause you said based on photographs. Otherwise national banks usually ask for more than half of the note. At least in that's how they do it in Germany and Romania.
    - ggm 5y ago
      Your point is clearer to me now. No, you can't literally recover money simply because you have a photograph of it. There is a recovery path for damaged and destroyed money, highly dependent on the serial number (which is why 50% of the note is typically requested) Here's the Australian rules after a significant bushfire. Partial re-imbursement for up to 80% loss of the face of the note. https://au.sports.yahoo.com/bushfires-burnt-your-cash-heres-what-to-do-003616395.html https://au.sports.yahoo.com/bushfires-burnt-your-cash-heres-... The point I was trying to make is that the actual value of the exchange is not only visible, its entirely visible. The specific value can be proved. If this was analogous in real world currency, Claim for loss would be possible.

ssiddharth 5y ago

In case you’re wondering what happened, from the thread: 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. For contracts that want to only work with ERC-20 tokens, you use WETH, which comes from a contract that takes 1 eth and gives you 1 WETH. A known problem with ERC-20 tokens is that transferring them to a contract that isn't made to access them is equivalent to burning them. You should almost never transfer ERC-20 to a smart contract. You instead use approve to give the smart contract permission to withdraw, then call the function you want to receive and tell it to make the withdraw (the contract will internally call transferFrom).

rob_c 5y ago
So to paraphrase. Broken technology with serious bugs Therefore anyone looking to do anything other than gain speculative wealth should stay well away. Another one born every minute...
dragonwriter 5y ago
So it's super-bad UX where radically different interaction patterns are used for what are to the user similar kinds of interaction, creating a trap.
- T0Bi 5y ago
  The thing is that there are enough frontends using this smart contract where you can simply chose 'WETH to ETH' and you'll get the right transaction. For whatever reason this person thought it'd be a great idea to interact with the smart contract directly. This is possible and fine if you either know what you're doing or read the smart contract beforehand. This user unfortunately did neither.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > The thing is that there are enough frontends using this smart contract where you can simply chose 'WETH to ETH' and you'll get the right transaction. For whatever reason this person thought it'd be a great idea to interact with the smart contract directly. Getting out of the supposed user-opacity of legalese to something that was safe and reasonable for a non-elite-priesthood users to understand, trust, and interact with directly without an intermediary was, I thought, the whole allure of smart contracts over using the old-fashioned dumb kind to manage transactions and business relations.

jcun4128 5y ago

I did something similar on a thankfully tiny scale. Was screwing around with different cheap coins and did something like sending Reddcoin to Litecoin and yeah I just lost it. But it was pennies. For more context I was messing around with Shapeshift back in 2018 which you generate a deposit and withdraw address for some crypto currency pair eg. LTC to Doge. I messed up this process.

wruza 5y ago

Is this a motivation issue with crypto? Here is what I mean. Centralized systems work like a web of tunnels - you can’t send “nowhere” or make a huge mistake, but if your part of a tunnel gets shut for some reason, you’re locked. Decentralized ones are like an endless empty void with point-like islands of ownership in it. You can send anywhere, but make one mistake and it’s over. Now pepper this with our usual issues with code correctness and debugging. The issue is that people do like tunnels because they feel safe, and empty voids are scary. This incentives to still build and use tunnels around this void, which makes “crypto”-ness just an implementation detail not worth using as is by the masses. Afaiu, this happens for two reasons: 1, the usual, people tend to forget assertions. 2, the new one, crypto institutions who make contracts are incentivized to omit assertions because runtime now costs serious money. They are like factories where there is no rule of safety yet. Is the above correct, or is it a true half a million dollars mistake? You can’t trust node_modules as it seems, how can you trust piles of contracts code when there is no support, no takedowns of bad versions and no easily accessible (and decentralized?) audit? Also, could a type system help in this case?

rosndo 5y ago
>Centralized systems work like a web of tunnels - you can’t send “nowhere” or make a huge mistake You can totally make a 1 digit typo while making a bank transfer that results in all the money being lost. Perhaps you’ll recover it after years of litigation, but that’s really not guaranteed. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/dec/07/i-lost-my-193000-inheritance-with-one-wrong-digit-on-my-sort-code https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/dec/07/i-lost-my-1930... E: downvoted by upset bankers? :)
- josephcsible 5y ago
  But at least in that case, it's possible to get the money back. In this case, isn't the money absolutely, totally, 100% gone forever?
  - rosndo 5y ago
    Sort of? You could appeal to the Ethereum developers, they could reasonably recover these funds without upsetting anyone too much by just refunding all WETH transactions sent to that contract. (This is the root of the spiritual disagreement between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic) Of course you’re more likely to succeed when it’s real money and the other party has to worry about getting sued. But even in the case of a bank transfer, the other party can abscond with your money and it’ll be extremely hard to recover since law enforcement probably won’t help you and (especially international) litigation costs can quickly render such an endeavor far too expensive.

ddoice 5y ago

I lost 4.5K transfering USDT from Binance to Coinbase From time to time I check if the money is still there. The last time I asked Coinbase support they didn't even bother to answer me. I was not investing, one of my contractors unilaterally decided to pay me in crypto.

rwmj 5y ago
> I was not investing, one of my contractors unilaterally decided to pay me in crypto. Why didn't you tell him that you wanted to be paid in real money?
- toomanydoubts 5y ago
  Because then they would say "ok, here's crypto".
  - noitpmeder 5y ago
    That's not usually how contracts work (in the sense of the actual law, not this smart contract bullshit).
    - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
      Try enforcing anything overseas..
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - aqaq 5y ago
      If I told you in the contract that I'd pay you in iphones, I'm pretty sure you would have to accept them as payment?
- ddoice 5y ago
  Yup, their response was crypto or nothing

londons_explore 5y ago

This is really a problem to be solved by etherium clients. Instead of just saying "what address should we send this to?", they should have code which allows a "preview" of what will happen after the transfer. After all, all the logic is there on the Blockchain, so the client can easily pop up a warning saying "what you are trying to send will be permanently unspendable. You can't so this without the --i-want-to-destroy-my-coins flag". The preview logic could recognise various common smart contracts to give the user a better idea what the spending conditions for each are too.

ipnon 5y ago
What's frustrating is there are already many decentralized exchanges handling billions of dollars a day that perfectly solve this problem. If you insist on making bank deposits by tunneling into their servers and writing C, don't complain when they can't find your money later. Use the app!
- Adrox 5y ago
  He seems to have used MetaMask! He was not writing any code or “tunneling into their servers”! Unless MetaMask is not recomended anymore and I should use centralized websites that I have no idea what code they are running? Even my bank that has a REST API would probably tell me where the money went, instead of “it’s gone”.
  - mattdesl 5y ago
    Interacting with a contract by sending it tokens (and having no idea what the outcome will be) is about as risky behaviour as you can imagine, and is quite a lot like using a low level API to circumvent the guardrails put in place by typical payment processors. Certainly client and wallet UX can be dramatically improved to mitigate these problems. And education more generally about the risks of interacting with smart contracts, which there are many.
    - Adrox 5y ago

londons_explore 5y ago

No value was lost here... Since everyone can see this is unspendable, It's simply a donation to all other users in the form of burning coins and increasing the value of all other coins.

withinboredom 5y ago
That’s like saying “oops I burned my house down. Everyone can see it’s unspendable but at least it increased my neighbors value of their house because there are less houses.” Houses (and crypto) are worth actual cash. Burning them doesn’t increase the value of others in any meaningful way.
- tinco 5y ago
  No, a burned down house can be rebuilt and burning down a house actually increases entropy in the universe. It is a clear destruction of value. Burning Ethereum irreplaceably removes it from the pool. Ethereum is not inherently valuable, the Eth is just a token representing a contribution to the network, that you do not redeem it just makes everyone's Ethereum a little bit more valuable. This is also why crypto is worth such ridiculously large amounts. Almost everyone is "HODLing", not redeeming their ETH for money, so the Ethereum that is in circulation is more valuable.
sumedh 5y ago
> No value was lost here... But he warmed the planet for no reason.
rob_c 5y ago
Sounds like a good way of inflating a bogus coin that will cause a rush on it...

cliftonk 5y ago

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/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead9083c756cc2 https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead...

system2 5y ago
Crypto gets dumber by the day.
captn3m0 5y ago
What’s the other 20b worth of eth for?
- cliftonk 5y ago
  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)
- dylkil 5y ago
  people send eth to get weth back, weth is an erc20 wrapper for eth - wrapped eth

tomcooks 5y ago

Why worry about mainstream crypto adoption to the point you want to remove the freedoms that brought you there in the first place?

westcoast330 5y ago

The future of currency ladies and gentlemen. This money is literally gone. Unrecoverable. Like he took the money out to a barrel and burned it. Only he didn't get any warmth out of it in exchange.

tsujp 5y ago
Ether isn’t intended to be used as a monetary currency like a dollar (reasonable stable). Its purpose is to pay for EVM instructions which are priced in gas. This is like saying because shoes happen to be worth money (sneakers/trainers) and because people happen to speculate on the price of shoes that the future of money is shoes. Bitcoin claims to be currency, Ether (used to pay for execution fees on Ethereum) does not.
yoavm 5y ago
Considering the emissions of all proof-of-work-based Blockchains, he probably warmed all of us.
- xzjis 5y ago
  Since I'm mining ETH when I'm not gaming, he maybe warmed me.
- vmception 5y ago
  thats pretty funny but for anyone else that wants to learn about this stuff, proof of work blockchains use the same energy whether transactions occur or not ironically this seemingly would actually bolster the argument against Proof of Work, but its probably more convenient that people are easily swayed towards inaccurate arguments
- noduerme 5y ago
  ah. Such an easy setup, it was a sure thing I'd be second to the party.
noduerme 5y ago
At least the rest of the planet got a little warmer /s

s5300 5y ago

Eh, as somebody who flubbed 7 $ figures in crypto after 2 weeks of extreme sleep deprivation… He’ll be okay ;)

Seattle3503 5y ago
Mind sharing your story?
rob_c 5y ago
F

YATA0 5y ago

Crypto Darwinism is a real thing. Insane to see that amount of money just disappear. Literally just poof, it's gone. Not "gone" like someone stole it, because that money didn't disappear, the thief has it now. This money literally went into a digital blackhole.

nikanj 5y ago
The price of eth is surprisingly easy to calculate, with the coin price being (new dollars people are willing to invest into crypto)/(amount of coins in circulation). There are no pesky externalities like "amount of EBITDA per outstanding eth", every single dollar is coming from someone buying in. This reduced the denominator, thus increasing the value of eth.
- YATA0 5y ago
  Is this a GPT-3 generated comment? Did you reply to the wrong thread?
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  The EBITDA of eth is exactly 0, actually.
  - 0x64 5y ago
    Depends on what you count as earnings; Ethereum did $9.9b in transaction fees and tips alone last year. [1] https://stark.mirror.xyz/q3OnsK7mvfGtTQ72nfoxLyEV5lfYOqUfJIoKBx7BG1I https://stark.mirror.xyz/q3OnsK7mvfGtTQ72nfoxLyEV5lfYOqUfJIo...
    - cuteboy19 5y ago
      That's the cost the network pays to miners/core devs. So EBITDA comes out very negative
      - 0x64 5y ago

ddtaylor 5y ago

I love how everyone assumes that the ETH blockchain is immutable and there is nothing that can happen to undo any of this. Did everyone simply forget when the Dao had a contract bug and the ETH devs literally just rolled back the transaction?

aemreunal 5y ago
So crypto is immutable, "code is law", decentralized, whatever, until people need to roll back transactions and use centralized exchanges because "they already solved these issues"? Seems like a whole lot of global warming just to re-invent a terrible imitation of banking...
- neuronic 5y ago
  > decentralized After reading Moxie's blog post on web3 [1] I feel it is a stretch to call anything Ehtereum-based decentralized anymore when this many applications use Alchemy or Infura as providers for their Ethereum nodes. [1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
  - dandanua 5y ago
    It's not just nodes. It's also - exchanges - mining pools - mixers - oracles Also, core devs and all stable cryptos are "centralized" by definition. This whole ecosystem is just cancer to a traditional society. It's not an evolution.
    - xtracto 5y ago
      Cancer like in the health issue? Or cancer like how Open Source (GPL) was a cancer back in the 2000s?
  - e12e 5y ago
    Thank you for that link, I see it was posted to hn, but gained little traction. It certainly puts words to my feelings around current "crypto" trends as someone (probably like moxie) that still remember the first wave of cypherpunks[1] and dreams of digital currencies. It feels strange when a lot of smart people insists on something that's obviously false in a practical, real-world sense - and it's nice to see someone else shine a light on that, and explain in simple, correct terms what's actually going on. I wonder if there are any emerging systems that are more likely to realise the idea (ideals) of digital currencies and smart contracts? I had hopes for etherum, but now I'm thinking that if we'll ever get there, it'd be in the next generation (call it third generation, bitcoin being first, etherum second - and earlier things generation zero). I'm thinking it would be proof-of-stake, and somehow viable as real peer to peer, or split in a more sane way between infrastructure and "wallets". [1] See eg this for a summary and some pointers https://nakamoto.com/the-cypherpunks/ https://nakamoto.com/the-cypherpunks/

StringyBob 5y ago

Having watched cryptocurrency from a distance via HN etc. for over a decade, I thought I had a general understanding, but this made me realize I wasn’t aware of what smart contracts really were (just looked up solidity today and details of The DAO hack). The potential for irreversible losses, fraud and security holes are much bigger than I realized. This also lead me to this video which will now be my ‘go to’ recommendation for anyone asking about crypto and NFTs - it’s a general critique and social commentary of the issues with crypto - not specifically about this case, but I thought excellent, and the first time I think I’ve watched a 2hr vid on YouTube ‘Line goes up’ - https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g

richardburton 5y ago
- theshrike79 5y ago
  Wait, you're actually comparing crypto to a symphony? Is the orchestra a bunch of first graders who have never played an instrument? =)
- noduerme 5y ago
  What could be more of a rat's nest than the crypto scams? As soon as it became possible for anyone to create a token it just became a race to the bottom. It's the ultimate recepticle for scammers.
  - rvz 5y ago
    > As soon as it became possible for anyone to create a token it just became a race to the bottom. Exactly. All enabled and caused by Ethereum. First the ICOs, then anyone can create their own scam ERC-20 tokens, The DAO (which got hacked and hard forked to reverse the funds), NFTs (which have nothing to do with ownership), which once you scale up all of that it basically becomes unusable due to the 'gas fees' for every operation. Spend $200 to swap $1 worth of tokens using dapps like Uniswap. One can go as far as to say that the Ethereum logo is literally a pyramid. Now what does that tell us? A pyramid scheme? who knows. From the start, they are probably trying to tell us that they know it is a scam. At this point, everyone will eventually jump on the scheme itself anyway even when everyone knows it is a scam.

invalidusernam3 5y ago

If I was not 100% confident in performing this transaction (which I would never be) I would send $1 as a test before sending the other $499,999. Is there a technical reason preventing one doing a test transaction first?

daviddoran 5y ago
Even then, whenever you’re dealing with large amounts there’s risk. E.g., early on in Bitcoin’s development a user lost a lot of Bitcoin by making a small test transfer, not realising that the change (their remaining balance) was sent to a new address in their wallet. But they were running a bootable Linux Distro from a CD and didn’t save the wallet back to a USB or other permanent storage. So they’ll never have access to those keys.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Ah, that sounds like lovely use case for average users with higher than 0 chance of blackouts... Right timing bad design(sensible one) and it is all gone... So in the end regular user probably ends up doing everything on centralized wallets or exchanges and then those are likely to do some off-chain book keeping as that is cheaper... Brining us back to banking...
- ciupicri 5y ago
  How was this possible, for the change to be sent to a new address? If I understand correctly what you're saying is that the account was split in two: one part went to the wanted destination and the rest to an unwanted destination.
  - ripply 5y ago
    Yes, this is how Bitcoin is designed and has worked from the beginning. The problem is his wallet did save the private key for the change address he just didn’t save the wallet, so it was lost - the changed address wasn’t unwanted, it was wanted, it just didn’t get saved. I believe early Bitcoin wallets generated addresses randomly so you couldn’t recover everything from a seed and had to save your wallet.

yumraj 5y ago

I understand ETH, but WTF is WETH?

trenchgun 5y ago
WETH is WTF ETF.
halfdan 5y ago
There's a page explaining it with that exact title: https://weth.io/ https://weth.io/ Can't say I understand it now after reading it though.
proto-n 5y ago
Eth is the native token, WETH is an ERC20 token (token creted by a contract implementing the ERC20 interface). Many applications don't want to handle these separately, so they only accept ERC20 tokens. WETH is Eth wrapped in a token contract (can be warpped or unwrapped 1:1). Think of it as similar to Java's int vs Integer.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kilroy123 5y ago
  But why?
  - sethaurus 5y ago
    Lots of different things live on the Ethereum blockchain: there's ETH itself, which we might call "raw money", and then there are abstract tokens (of both the fungible and non-fungible sort). To make a programming analogy, there are lots of systems which are "generic" over tokens — they can deal with many kinds of token, as long as it's the standard shape. Raw money doesn't have this shape, so WETH is a very simple "wrapper token". You can trade 1 ETH for 1 WETH and then use it in some token-compatible system. The exchange rate for WETH is fixed by the (very short) contract, and it's supposed to be simple to trade money for tokens or vice versa — although given this poor sod's story, it's arguably not that simple after all.

quickthrower2 5y ago

Could there be a big warning where you type “IAmAnIdiot” to continue for common mistakes like this? Built into all wallets like MetaMask.

dandanua 5y ago

No, those ethereum coins are just "wrapped" forever /s There are many more cases of this, someone else burned $300k half a year ago, in the same way.

fabian2k 5y ago

So I don't know how smart contracts are implemented at all. But I would have expected this to work more like a statically typed programming language. If this particular address doesn't handle this kind of input, it should not be possible to send it.

noitpmeder 5y ago
It is statically typed, as in this input fired off the WETH implementation that runs a no-op and returns void.

yashg 5y ago

Banks suck! Death to the central banks! Down with fiat! Code is law! All hail the future of finance.

cuteboy19 5y ago
Cryptocurrency is fiat, in that unlike commodity money, they are not backed by anything

0x_rs 5y ago

I used crypto in the past, starting a decade ago, but absolutely cannot wrap my head around these new-age concepts such as smart contracts, dozen ETH flavors and whatnot. They seem blackboxes to me no matter how much I read about them. The fact you have to use a withdrawal function instead of the reverse operation used for the initial conversion seems a pretty severe design overlook since they're burned forever this way.

xtracto 5y ago
I still use crypto and grok smart contracts alright. But exactly this shit of wrapped tokens, same tokens in different blockchains and whatnot is a recipe for disaster.
dylkil 5y ago
If you dont know what you are doing you should never interact with a smart contract directly. People like the guy who lost 500k should be using the frontends which interact with the contracts properly. https://wrapeth.com/ https://wrapeth.com/
- icedistilled 5y ago
  it's like telling someone never to deal with physical cash or dollar bills, only use credit cards.
  - dylkil 5y ago
    no its like telling someone to not craft their own payload and call the api directly. Use the front end which handles that for you.

noitpmeder 5y ago

Can he even claim this as a loss on his tax returns? My guess is no...

samarama 5y ago

That’s like dropping half a million dollar in USD and your account number in front of the bank at night when it’s closed and expecting the bank to credit it to your account.

dorkwood 5y ago
What would actually happen, in this case, assuming the bank found the money? I feel like they'd most likely have to report it, rather than destroy it.

in3d 5y ago

It's not a great situation that this is possible but you could make a similar error for the same amount of money in your brokerage account and also have no recourse. It could be a typo in the ticker symbol, you could buy an option for the wrong month, you could buy instead of selling, you could enter an extra zero, you could not notice a multiplier for the futures, you could let a physical delivery future expire, etc. Using Interactive Brokers or other brokers with advanced user interfaces, it's even possible to turn off confirmations or do most things with just a keyboard or through an API. I don't see this situation as significantly different.

rich_sasha 5y ago
But it is. If you buy the wrong asset, you can sell it back and get most of your money back. There is a low friction “undo” button. No such thing in crypto.
- in3d 5y ago
  Buy a penny stock or an illiquid option and you certainly won't get most of your money back. In addition, there are many other hidden risks. For example, you could have the broker increase the margin rates overnight leading to forced liquidations or the stock could be halted and impossible to trade for months. You can even end up owing more than your whole account is worth if margin is enabled.
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    Right, if I’m unlucky then sure, something like this can happen. But I’d have to be really unlucky and/or careless to really lose 20%+ of my money. Whereas with crypto it’s so easy to lose 100% plus gas fees, all the time.
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  Options work differently, you can lose all your money.
  - 5y ago

blastonico 5y ago

The first transaction must always be with a very tiny fraction of that money. Assuming you know something may cost a lot.

capableweb 5y ago

Since no one seems to think about how this could have prevented, here is a simple way, which I've applied to lots of things in life, not just cryptocurrency transfers: - If you're making a transfer somewhere with a large amount, do a small transfer first and verify it's working. Confirm at the receiving end before moving big sums. - If you're calling a contract, try it with a small amount first. Verify the parameters multiple times, and verify the return values multiple times. - If you're doing something with a huge sum of money, do it in steps instead of all-at-once. Fees won't be as big since you're already dealing with a huge sum of money anyways - Verify verify and verify that everything went alright with the small sum before trying to do something with a big sum - If you're tired, don't do it. Wait until you got some sleep - If you're rushed, don't do it. Wait until you're not rushed, have a tea and think about it - When in doubt, verify it and don't be tired - If you're not an expert, have someone who is do verification above for you

srcreigh 5y ago
Sounds great. I'm sure there's checks in place to ensure the smart contract can't have different logic for small amounts and large amounts. Right?
- vmception 5y ago
  There are many ways to check that, yes. But the best way is to use a trusted contract. The other ways are pretty absurd burdens to put on a user.
rrrhys 5y ago
- If it's complex and not automated, make a checklist, print it, check it off line by line.
dfgdfgasqqw 5y ago
> - If you're not an expert, have someone who is do verification above for you I would modify this to > - If you're not an expert, have someone who is do verification above in addition to you (not instead of you)
5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

irthomasthomas 5y ago

How did this just drop off the front page so quickly with 206 points in 6 hours? Anyway, I thought this comment by the OP was interesting... I thought a test transaction of sending ETH and getting WETH back was enough proof. My mistake was that I made an assumption about the reverse direction. Didn't see anywhere (including the official site) that we shouldn't directly interact with the contract and we have to use a dapp :/

jb1991 5y ago
I’m just guessing, but maybe it was flagged. By multiple users. That would not affect the vote count I don’t think, but it would affect its ranking on the page.
dorkwood 5y ago
Aren't posts with more comments than points downweighted?

MrPatan 5y ago

Sure, the tech is not perfect. But it will get better over time, not worse. Soon there may be a "good version" of it that replaces a big chunk of anything financial and financializes another chunk of everything else. Or maybe not. I understand assigning a low probability to that event, but the upside is so big that it's still a bit weird to be just a hater and not make a lottery-ticket-sized investment. Or I guess the chance of being able to tell randos on the internet "I told you so and they never fooled me!" in a few years if it fails must be a similar-sized reward in utility.

user-the-name 5y ago
It won't get better. It's been here for years, it's not got better during that time. There is no sign that will change. There's no need for it to get better, because there are already enough fools using it.
zucker42 5y ago
Well the argument people would make for not buying is that, similar to buying a lottery ticket, "investing" in ETH has negative expected value (or at least EV less than opportunity cost).
parksy 5y ago
There's a huge swing against literally anything crypto-related at the moment. I feel a big part of it is that big gaming companies pricked their ears up on the idea of NFTs and being able to own a marketplace sipping the cream from billions of microtransactions in realtime. Serious gamers really, really don't like that idea, having already been screwed down by DLC's, Pre-ordering, buggy and unfinished games, "seasons", "surprise mechanics" (literally gambling for virtual items). The general consensus has spun around to being that anything crypto is a scam, elaborate ponzi/pyramid scheme, etc, etc. Bored Apes is a bit silly, NFTs could technically be used for so much more but that would require the right platform, and legislative support (ie the backing of society) to have meaning. I think the cat is out of the bag tech-wise. I think you're right that improvements will be made - blockchain / distributed ledger / whatever you want simply exists now, and I doubt it will ever stop existing. Ignoring the tidal wave of criticism it faces now, some valid, some not, it has inherent technological advantages in cases where trustless, distributed, peer to peer transactional events need to be rigidly catalogued and visible to all participants. I also think most of these positive advancements that will change the fabric of society yada yada, will require the profit motive to be eliminated completely, where maintaining a blockchain becomes something done for ethical or moral reasons like folding@home rather than hoping to ride the next whale's massive pump. It's kinda sad how desparate we all are for riches, billions of us but the financial incentive is the best motivator we could come up with. But I digress. Prepare to be shouted down over the next few months / years for saying anything positive about any blockchainish-tech, it's all pretty well tarred with the same brush as NFTs and dodgey doge market manipulation at this point. It'll calm down eventually. It is what it is. Probably a well deserved critique of a concept that is still at a point equivalent to computers in the 80s vs smartphones today. Give it time. People will find a proper use for it.

jasfi 5y ago

This is why people say the UI for crypto/Web 3 sucks.

Sargos 5y ago
This wasn't really a UI problem as this was someone manually calling functions meant only for software developers. No users would ever do this as they are using apps which abstract all of this away and you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get into this situation. Anyone can hurt themselves using tools they don't understand carelessly.

greenSunglass 5y ago

why would you want to "wrap" Ethereum?

vmception 5y ago
the native asset of the virtual machine lacks the expanded primitives that people are accustomed in the other assets they've created wrapping it lets it inherit those primitives for use in other programs more easily many programs handle the wrapping and unwrapping just-in-time behind the scenes, using a chained method call to the same contract OP used Its pretty hard to mess up, but OP managed to

egypturnash 5y ago

jdhzzz 5y ago

Obligatory "Happy Fun Ball" reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmqeZl8OI2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmqeZl8OI2M

nickjj 5y ago

Here's an unrelated but related question: How do you store your wallet / private keys where you would be comfortable storing an amount of money that's important to you? It feels like a bunch of consumer grade options we have are kind of flaky: Flash drives are extremely undependable. I've had a few fail to read after sitting in a closet for a year. SSDs can supposedly have data loss pretty quickly if left unpowered (days to months). DVDs have decent lasting power (I have some CDs that still work after 15 years) but this makes me nervous because it's so susceptible to damage. HDDs also make me think what would happen if it's not powered on for 5-10+ years (it's mechanical, does it use some type of oil internally to keep friction down?). Putting it on the cloud seems risky, even with encryption at rest and now we need to backup the encryption keys. I guess tape is still our best bet? I would also think if you have a decent amount of crypto you'd likely want to have 3 backups in your apartment along with 3 offsite backups, perhaps lock boxes in a few different banks in different towns (or even hundreds of miles apart). Basically it still feels like a huge pain in the butt to keep digital currency secure and available. The more backups you have, the more risk you have around being compromised but the less backups you have the more susceptible you are to data loss and losing everything.

topranks 5y ago
While “being your own bank”, aka keeping all your savings in a shoe box under the bed, is idiotic, you can simply write the seed phrases down in ink on paper. So you don’t necessarily need some digital storage to keep them.
ur-whale 5y ago
Jameson Lopp has a ton of resources on the topic (bitcoin centric, but lots of it translates immediately to other cryptos): https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information/security.html https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information/security.html
CydeWeys 5y ago
Paper backups are the best option for this. Private keys are simple enough that a whole wallet can be printed to a single piece of paper using an OCR-friendly font.

mtnGoat 5y ago

Newer contracts, if built well, have rescue mechanisms built in.

awhitby 5y ago
It's notable that after hundreds of years of experience in writing contracts, real world legal systems still rely on courts to interpret them in a reasonable and equitable manner because we cannot possibly anticipate every edge case and build in every rescue mechanism. Smart contracts really shouldn't be called contracts - it's a misleading analogy.
- mtnGoat 5y ago
  Smart is laughable, they are just functions that live on someone else’s computer. ;)

_hudj 5y ago

[dead]

voidfunc 5y ago

Ouch hard lesson to learn. I burned some ETH earlier this year trying to buy SHIB for shits and giggles. This is a problem that needs to be figured out before crypto can go mainstream.

user-the-name 5y ago
The lesson being "crypto is insane garbage that nobody should touch with a ten-foot pole".

booleandilemma 5y ago

Luckily I’m not smart enough to lose that much money so quickly.

runeks 5y ago
Nor rich enough
- booleandilemma 5y ago
  Someone’s offended :)
  - runeks 5y ago
    ;)

fredsmith42 5y ago

I don't know anything about crypto. Why can't he contact someone on the receiving end of the transaction and say "I really messed up, please transfer this money back to me?". I know crypto transactions can't be undone, but a new transaction of equal value in the reverse direction could be done, right? And if not, why the hell not?

chrisshroba 5y ago
This is true if the recipient is a person, but in this case it is a "Smart contract" which means it has particular programmed behavior and cannot just be asked to do something for ethical reasons. If it is not programmed to return money, it can't return money, and if it is not programmed to be reprogrammable, then it can't be reprogrammed to help this person.
- icedistilled 5y ago
  how "smart" is a contract that will delivers good to non-existent entities. How "smart" is a contract that is actually a piece of code that's riddled with footguns? Calling these things "smart" contracts was the joke of the century.
runeks 5y ago
> And if not, why the hell not? Because he sent funds to a contract (a program) and not a person (a private key). The operation of the given contract (the actual program) cannot be altered, which is useful in the sense that you can inspect the contract code and make sure that it does what you want with the funds you send to it.
jb3689 5y ago
It is truly mind-boggling to me that funds can just effectively vanish in the system with no sense of recourse. And that no one thought this could go awry
- vmception 5y ago
  Funds being inaccessible contribute to the scarcity of everyone else’s funds Just don't let it happen to you Thats the game! People like it, it goes awry upwards!

wutwutwutwut 5y ago

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

TacticalCoder 5y ago

I have literally zero clue as to how that ETH/WETH smart contract work but... Why the heck did the guy not first did a test with 1 000 USD worth of coins instead of 500 000 USD? Once he sees everything is cool with 1 000 USD, he sends the rest. Sounds like 101 to me.

echopurity 5y ago

nextlevelwizard 5y ago

To be fair OP in question did not lose half a million dollars. There is no proof he could have exchnaged all that ETH into dollars.

neoromantique 5y ago
500k in ETH is nothing liquidity wise.
CamelCaseName 5y ago
Look, I hate cryptocurrency as much as the average HN commenter, but I think at this point it should painfully clear that there is plenty of liquidity in crypto. $500K in ETH is really not that much anymore.

norswap 5y ago

Seems fishy to me when he says "I just sent ETH to the contract to get WETH" because this is assuredly not how it works. You have to call the `deposit` function of the smart contract (transfering ETH with it indeed). And to withdraw your WETH as ETH, you call `withdraw`. These calls can be made from here (power user interface! not recommended - use Uniswap instead): https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead9083c756cc2#writeContract https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead... The source code of the contract is here: https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead9083c756cc2#code https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead...

conroydave 5y ago
are you sure the deposit function isnt automatically called?
- norswap 5y ago
  It is, see the comment of vmception above.
vmception 5y ago
Thank you! Finally a code discussion here instead of all this pearl clutching hysteria. So, this is all about the ‘payable’ method, which means it is triggered by the native asset of the virtual machine. If you look closely you’ll see there is a default anonymous function with ‘payable’ accessor method which calls the deposit() method
- norswap 5y ago
  Oh duh! Thanks for pointing that out, I forgot about that, and I really should have known better!

reaperducer 5y ago

$500,000 is a lot of money. He should get in touch with his banker, either in person, on the phone, or online. If that doesn't work, escalate to the appropriate regulatory agency. Oh, wait... crypto.