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I think this is a problem with crypto that will forever prevent it from becoming mainstream. The average person understands the concept of money but understandi

I think this is a problem with crypto that will forever prevent it from becoming mainstream. The average person understands the concept of money but understanding smart contracts is out of scope for a large part of the general population m

vmception 5y ago
Its more analogous to being surprised that a VCR might occassionally eat up and destroy a VHS tape, and thinking “this will stop mainstream adoption”
vmception 5y ago
Billions have been transferred through that contract with no problem. Its pretty much the worse example to bring up that copypasta. This was an early adopter that just got around to experimenting and didnt even try to keep up with how things work now.
kylebenzle 5y ago
Cyberdog 5y ago
Agreed. It's so powerful but always so complex and confusing and there's just way too many footguns like this. "Gas" is one of those concepts where I have to relearn what it is every time I read about it but never can retain it for very long. (See also Big O notation.) Say what you will about the primitiveness of Bitcoin and other early coins but at least they're quite a bit more comprehensible.
- Traubenfuchs 5y ago
  > gas Isn‘t that just the fee for transfering cryptocoins from one wallet to another? And you can decide on how much it is for your transfers, but if it‘s too low, your transfer will take a long time, up to „infinity/never“.
  - posterboy 5y ago
    Gas is the reward for servers in tthe distributed system when they are (taking part in?) executing the smart contract, so that a buggy infinite loop would run out of gas soon. With 500k$ this smart contract will be able to run for a while.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    smart contracts rack up fees for every machine instruction if your gas doesnt cover the runtime of the contract, the process rolls back all transactions and eats the fee. so you have to overshoot and get refunded the difference. always seemed like a nonstarter to me, that the computer cant tell me how much gas it needs (see: halting problem)
tommek4077 5y ago
Just because you can do crazy stuff, doesn't mean you have to do it. Like the normal guy isn't trading interst rate derivates or stuff like that. Also at least with european banking, if you wringly send money to another account, it is also gone forever. A lot of scams regarding old people build up on this. We do not need to buy google play store vouchers like the americans tonget scammed.
- SilasX 5y ago
  >Like the normal guy isn't trading interst rate derivates or stuff like that. Heh, funny you say that, because there was the submission about the danger of the 30-year fixed mortgage, and how the typical borrower is in fact, making an effective bet on interest rate derivatives! See this thread that quotes that part: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29774806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29774806
- phnofive 5y ago
  This is gone like into an incinerator though, right? There's by design no way of getting the WETH or ETH back, but also no one controls them anymore?
  - tinco 5y ago
    Yes. Also this is not the first person to make this mistake. One redditor pointed out the person has done the largest such transaction to this contract, representing 45% of the total amount burned.
- brazzy 5y ago
  >Also at least with european banking, if you wringly send money to another account, it is also gone forever. Not true. The money is still legally yours if you can prove that it's a mistake or you were deceived, and can be recovered via the legal system if the recipient does not refund it voluntarily. Scammers just move the money away via other, less traceable channels before that can happen.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
tetha 5y ago
Hm, but wouldn't smart contracts have to be as complex as a non-smart contract, if a smart contract were to replace the dumb contract? If I'm looking at the regular B2B contracts I'm supporting at work, even normal contracts are already testing people. Piling (highly complicated, mind you) software on top of that problem seems nuts and entirely not feasible.
- goodlinks 5y ago
  Dont know of any traditional contract that can accidentally make money vanish. Also you can go to a centralised authority e.g. bank or court to do something about the wrong party holding the funds at any given point. You can even retrospectively apply reasonable person type arguments no?
  - noduerme 5y ago
    The nearest scenario in dumb contracts would probably be wiring funds to the wrong foreign bank account. But there are usually a lot of intentionally placed checks before you do something that stupid. And even if you did, at least there's someone you can call. That seems a bit smarter, really.
  - tetha 5y ago
    And that is even an argument on top I didn't even mean. > You can even retrospectively apply reasonable person type arguments no? Yeah. A significant part of a traditional contract revolves around defining the entities and behaviors you're actually talking about, and another part is about specifying requirements and boundaries for these entities and behaviors. However, it is entirely possible that during a conflict, the parties of the contract disagree about the meanings of the words on paper. In such a case, you'd bring in a judge by bringing this to court, and a judge has the right to interpret the words and act in the spirit of the contract clauses, not just the words, and to deliberate about the feasibility of clauses. And that's a good thing, because this is a strong defense against scam and fraud. Like, if something really strongly looks like a contract to buy a car, but technically doesn't say you buy the car, but also doesn't say you don't buy the car. If you get sued for not paying rent or stealing the car in such a case, you could argue you thought you owned it. That's another, huge, topic.
kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
I think it is more a fundamental philosophical problem with Ethereum. They have fascinating ideas and workarounds for all sorts of issues, but in the end they keep layering complex solutions on more complex solutions. Maybe a bit like enterprise software, just add another abstraction layer...
- Gigachad 5y ago
  The problem is that irreversible transactions are just bad. There is no way around it. Crypto is broken at the most fundamental level. This kind of fuckup could not happen with regular banking and if you somehow did mess up you can almost always have your money recovered. There is no way to just black hole it never to be seen again.
  - tromp 5y ago
    Some cryptocurrencies make it impossible to black hole funds by requiring the recipient to prove they can spend the money they're about to receive before they receive it. Needless to say, these cryptocurrencies do not feature smart contracts.
  - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
    Afaik bank transactions are also non-reversible. I don't think that is the main issue, although certainly it is a problem. If it bothers you, you could probably also go through some service that insures your transactions and gives you a degree of reversibility.
    - pirate787 5y ago
      A service...like...a bank ?!?
      - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
        Sure, if it is important to you? But I think there are also smart contracts/escrow services that require you to do additional things besides pushing "send". The classic is for a trade, and the receiver has to confirm they received the stuff before the money is released. Afaik "traditional" companies like ebay also struggle with that kind of thing.
nly 5y ago
Even in todays traditional banking system there are a litany of cases where people refuse to take responsibility for their gullible actions and expect their bank to bail them out. There are a few stories on the ThisIsMoney (UK's Daily Mail's money rag) front page right now about relatively convincing and sophisticated scams where people were robbed of thousands. The average person isn't ready for the risk of crypto. https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/beatthescammers/article-10398797/I-lost-9-000-parcel-text-scam-wont-banks-pay-back.html https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/beatthescammers/article-... https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/beatthescammers/article-10440529/After-exposing-WhatsApp-Mum-Dad-scam-send-dossier-police.html https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/beatthescammers/article-...
- jquery 5y ago
  It’s really incredible how easy some of these scams appear to pull off. “I’m your oldest child and no my microphone doesn’t work so I can’t talk to you and I need $2000 immediately” and the parent bypasses warnings from the bank about possible fraud and shoves the transaction through… It also shows how many of these scams can be defeated with a few simple precautions. Most of them would be defeated by calling the bank back… in other words don’t answer your phone, make all your calls outgoing. Others are defeated by simply not doing anything hastily and under duress (like urgently wiring all your money to an external account for “safekeeping”).
  - hotpotamus 5y ago
    This is one of my actual fears for deep fakes - imagine actually being able to perfectly imitate someone's child to scam them. My parents and I long ago set up a codeword system as a way to delegate trust, but imagine actually hearing your child in distress - it could short circuit your skepticism pretty quickly.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Even in todays traditional banking system there are a litany of cases where people refuse to take responsibility for their gullible actions and expect their bank to bail them out. Yeah, but in today's traditional banking system people don't have to contend with currency-changing ATMs that change dollars to euros, and when you feed euros into them by mistake they just shred your money in stead of spitting it back out. That's not the user being gullible (or OK, maybe that too, but mainly), it's the system being moronic. Or perhaps rather, evil.
netrikare 5y ago
This can all be abstracted away, so end user doesn't even know he is interacting with blockchain tech.

vmception 5y ago

Its more analogous to being surprised that a VCR might occassionally eat up and destroy a VHS tape, and thinking “this will stop mainstream adoption”

vmception 5y ago

Billions have been transferred through that contract with no problem. Its pretty much the worse example to bring up that copypasta. This was an early adopter that just got around to experimenting and didnt even try to keep up with how things work now.

kylebenzle 5y ago

Cyberdog 5y ago

Agreed. It's so powerful but always so complex and confusing and there's just way too many footguns like this. "Gas" is one of those concepts where I have to relearn what it is every time I read about it but never can retain it for very long. (See also Big O notation.) Say what you will about the primitiveness of Bitcoin and other early coins but at least they're quite a bit more comprehensible.

Traubenfuchs 5y ago
> gas Isn‘t that just the fee for transfering cryptocoins from one wallet to another? And you can decide on how much it is for your transfers, but if it‘s too low, your transfer will take a long time, up to „infinity/never“.
- posterboy 5y ago
  Gas is the reward for servers in tthe distributed system when they are (taking part in?) executing the smart contract, so that a buggy infinite loop would run out of gas soon. With 500k$ this smart contract will be able to run for a while.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  smart contracts rack up fees for every machine instruction if your gas doesnt cover the runtime of the contract, the process rolls back all transactions and eats the fee. so you have to overshoot and get refunded the difference. always seemed like a nonstarter to me, that the computer cant tell me how much gas it needs (see: halting problem)

tommek4077 5y ago

Just because you can do crazy stuff, doesn't mean you have to do it. Like the normal guy isn't trading interst rate derivates or stuff like that. Also at least with european banking, if you wringly send money to another account, it is also gone forever. A lot of scams regarding old people build up on this. We do not need to buy google play store vouchers like the americans tonget scammed.

SilasX 5y ago
>Like the normal guy isn't trading interst rate derivates or stuff like that. Heh, funny you say that, because there was the submission about the danger of the 30-year fixed mortgage, and how the typical borrower is in fact, making an effective bet on interest rate derivatives! See this thread that quotes that part: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29774806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29774806
phnofive 5y ago
This is gone like into an incinerator though, right? There's by design no way of getting the WETH or ETH back, but also no one controls them anymore?
- tinco 5y ago
  Yes. Also this is not the first person to make this mistake. One redditor pointed out the person has done the largest such transaction to this contract, representing 45% of the total amount burned.
brazzy 5y ago
>Also at least with european banking, if you wringly send money to another account, it is also gone forever. Not true. The money is still legally yours if you can prove that it's a mistake or you were deceived, and can be recovered via the legal system if the recipient does not refund it voluntarily. Scammers just move the money away via other, less traceable channels before that can happen.
- Gigachad 5y ago

tetha 5y ago

Hm, but wouldn't smart contracts have to be as complex as a non-smart contract, if a smart contract were to replace the dumb contract? If I'm looking at the regular B2B contracts I'm supporting at work, even normal contracts are already testing people. Piling (highly complicated, mind you) software on top of that problem seems nuts and entirely not feasible.

goodlinks 5y ago
Dont know of any traditional contract that can accidentally make money vanish. Also you can go to a centralised authority e.g. bank or court to do something about the wrong party holding the funds at any given point. You can even retrospectively apply reasonable person type arguments no?
- noduerme 5y ago
  The nearest scenario in dumb contracts would probably be wiring funds to the wrong foreign bank account. But there are usually a lot of intentionally placed checks before you do something that stupid. And even if you did, at least there's someone you can call. That seems a bit smarter, really.
- tetha 5y ago
  And that is even an argument on top I didn't even mean. > You can even retrospectively apply reasonable person type arguments no? Yeah. A significant part of a traditional contract revolves around defining the entities and behaviors you're actually talking about, and another part is about specifying requirements and boundaries for these entities and behaviors. However, it is entirely possible that during a conflict, the parties of the contract disagree about the meanings of the words on paper. In such a case, you'd bring in a judge by bringing this to court, and a judge has the right to interpret the words and act in the spirit of the contract clauses, not just the words, and to deliberate about the feasibility of clauses. And that's a good thing, because this is a strong defense against scam and fraud. Like, if something really strongly looks like a contract to buy a car, but technically doesn't say you buy the car, but also doesn't say you don't buy the car. If you get sued for not paying rent or stealing the car in such a case, you could argue you thought you owned it. That's another, huge, topic.

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago

I think it is more a fundamental philosophical problem with Ethereum. They have fascinating ideas and workarounds for all sorts of issues, but in the end they keep layering complex solutions on more complex solutions. Maybe a bit like enterprise software, just add another abstraction layer...

Gigachad 5y ago
The problem is that irreversible transactions are just bad. There is no way around it. Crypto is broken at the most fundamental level. This kind of fuckup could not happen with regular banking and if you somehow did mess up you can almost always have your money recovered. There is no way to just black hole it never to be seen again.
- tromp 5y ago
  Some cryptocurrencies make it impossible to black hole funds by requiring the recipient to prove they can spend the money they're about to receive before they receive it. Needless to say, these cryptocurrencies do not feature smart contracts.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  Afaik bank transactions are also non-reversible. I don't think that is the main issue, although certainly it is a problem. If it bothers you, you could probably also go through some service that insures your transactions and gives you a degree of reversibility.
  - pirate787 5y ago
    A service...like...a bank ?!?
    - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
      Sure, if it is important to you? But I think there are also smart contracts/escrow services that require you to do additional things besides pushing "send". The classic is for a trade, and the receiver has to confirm they received the stuff before the money is released. Afaik "traditional" companies like ebay also struggle with that kind of thing.

nly 5y ago

Even in todays traditional banking system there are a litany of cases where people refuse to take responsibility for their gullible actions and expect their bank to bail them out. There are a few stories on the ThisIsMoney (UK's Daily Mail's money rag) front page right now about relatively convincing and sophisticated scams where people were robbed of thousands. The average person isn't ready for the risk of crypto. https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/beatthescammers/article-10398797/I-lost-9-000-parcel-text-scam-wont-banks-pay-back.html https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/beatthescammers/article-... https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/beatthescammers/article-10440529/After-exposing-WhatsApp-Mum-Dad-scam-send-dossier-police.html https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/beatthescammers/article-...

jquery 5y ago
It’s really incredible how easy some of these scams appear to pull off. “I’m your oldest child and no my microphone doesn’t work so I can’t talk to you and I need $2000 immediately” and the parent bypasses warnings from the bank about possible fraud and shoves the transaction through… It also shows how many of these scams can be defeated with a few simple precautions. Most of them would be defeated by calling the bank back… in other words don’t answer your phone, make all your calls outgoing. Others are defeated by simply not doing anything hastily and under duress (like urgently wiring all your money to an external account for “safekeeping”).
- hotpotamus 5y ago
  This is one of my actual fears for deep fakes - imagine actually being able to perfectly imitate someone's child to scam them. My parents and I long ago set up a codeword system as a way to delegate trust, but imagine actually hearing your child in distress - it could short circuit your skepticism pretty quickly.
CRConrad 5y ago
> Even in todays traditional banking system there are a litany of cases where people refuse to take responsibility for their gullible actions and expect their bank to bail them out. Yeah, but in today's traditional banking system people don't have to contend with currency-changing ATMs that change dollars to euros, and when you feed euros into them by mistake they just shred your money in stead of spitting it back out. That's not the user being gullible (or OK, maybe that too, but mainly), it's the system being moronic. Or perhaps rather, evil.

netrikare 5y ago

This can all be abstracted away, so end user doesn't even know he is interacting with blockchain tech.