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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 centra

by 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
  So, you don’t recomend MetaMask to send tokens? Which wallets/services would you recomend to avoid this situation? Would binance not allow me to send WETH to that wallet? Would any decentralized/centralized wallet be safer? Please tell me which? Or should I not be sending tokens and just use coinbase and binance non-centralized features?
  - ipnon 5y ago
    MetaMask is a wallet. You would use a decentralized exchange, like Uniswap, to transform WETH into ETH.
  - mattdesl 5y ago
    MetaMask is a wallet, the whole purpose is to send tokens (or to interact with a contract). All wallets basically enable this (ability to send tokens to any address in the network). Sending your tokens to a contract or invoking its methods without understanding what you are doing is extremely risky. MetaMask also includes a "Swap" feature which is designed solely to swap one token (e.g. ETH) to another (e.g. WETH) and back. Others might suggest an exchange application such as Uniswap or OpenSea to wrap/unwrap. MetaMask and other user-friendly wallets could take basic steps to recognize common patterns of mistakes (like sending tokens to a popular contract) and include additional warnings. Obviously there is still a huge risk to using crypto compared to just going to your bank and asking them to do financial transactions for you.

by Adrox 5y ago

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
So, you don’t recomend MetaMask to send tokens? Which wallets/services would you recomend to avoid this situation? Would binance not allow me to send WETH to that wallet? Would any decentralized/centralized wallet be safer? Please tell me which? Or should I not be sending tokens and just use coinbase and binance non-centralized features?
- ipnon 5y ago
  MetaMask is a wallet. You would use a decentralized exchange, like Uniswap, to transform WETH into ETH.
- mattdesl 5y ago
  MetaMask is a wallet, the whole purpose is to send tokens (or to interact with a contract). All wallets basically enable this (ability to send tokens to any address in the network). Sending your tokens to a contract or invoking its methods without understanding what you are doing is extremely risky. MetaMask also includes a "Swap" feature which is designed solely to swap one token (e.g. ETH) to another (e.g. WETH) and back. Others might suggest an exchange application such as Uniswap or OpenSea to wrap/unwrap. MetaMask and other user-friendly wallets could take basic steps to recognize common patterns of mistakes (like sending tokens to a popular contract) and include additional warnings. Obviously there is still a huge risk to using crypto compared to just going to your bank and asking them to do financial transactions for you.