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It's not really edge bases, it's how contracts works, and how this contract works. There is nothing magical here. It's a bit like avoiding the checksums that I

It's not really edge bases, it's how contracts works, and how this contract works. There is nothing magical here. It's a bit like avoiding the checksums that IBAN has, and then complaining that IBAN is broken. Most people interact with WETH via UIs, but for some reason this user chose not to, and got severely burned because of it. Things that require expertise usually requires one to know acronyms and how things works underneath, the cryptocurrency space is no different. Now I don't know what you do for a living, but it certainly isn't cryptocurrencies. I'm sure there are more industries you don't work with on a day-to-day basis, and when people who are in those industries talk with each other on a technical level, you'll see the same amount of jargon. That's just part of expertise in a subject. For example, two of my friends are chemists, and sometimes they talk chemistry stuff when we're having dinners and stuff. Of course I don't understand most of the stuff they are saying, but I'm not gonna claim "chemistry" is "magical knowledge" just because I don't understand it, so I'm not sure why you would about cryptocurrencies.

kuhewa 5y ago
Currencies don't come with a prerequisite of intimate knowledge of industrial jargon that requires use on a daily basis to be proficient enough in to not lose everything.
- nicbou 5y ago
  I've been paying attention to this whole thing for a few years, and I still can't tell how I could send coins to a friend if I had them.
- noduerme 5y ago
  Also, chemistry sets come with a lot of graphic warnings.
  - aniforprez 5y ago
    Do we need a "hot coffee is hot" warning label on every crypto transaction? And yes I'm aware the lady in the case suffered and it's terrible. I'm just being facetious
    - kuhewa 5y ago
      If it is ever going to solve a fraction of the societal ills promised, yeah sounds like it will need that warning.
    - IgorPartola 5y ago
      Oh come on. This is clearly a terrible system design choice and should have never been codified.
- capableweb 5y ago
  If you're gonna deal directly with the forex industry without any safe-guards there will definitely be a bunch of jargon around, have you ever dealt with the insides of forex trading before? In general, giving someone money does not require intimate knowledge of what's happening behind the scenes, that's true. But the submission is not about a normal transfer, the user is explicitly avoiding the safe-guards in place, and got burned by it. It's no surprise really.
  - kuhewa 5y ago
    > have you ever dealt with the insides of forex trading before? Why, is there a way to send currency directly and irrecoverably into a paper shredder on the inside?
    - capableweb 5y ago
      Do you actually understand what happened in this case? No one sent any currencies into a "shredder", so not sure why you're asking this question?
      - hootbootscoot 5y ago
        an immutable black hole might as well be a shredder. the OP in the reddit did precisely that. that money is GONE. locked away forever. it has not been transferred to anyone else.
        capableweb 5y ago
        Indeed, an "immutable black hole" could be described as a shredder, agree. But that's not what that address is. The semi-official "black hole" address for Ethereum is 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (https://etherscan.io/address/0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000000000000000000000000...), currently has $29,461,295.02 worth of ETH in it. Any other (valid) address is just another address on the network.
sshine 5y ago
Or like sticking the wrong plastic card into an ATM and observe the machine eat the card... and your bank account. You'd expect that invalid actions lead to idempotent errors, not glitch states where you lose everything.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > You'd expect that invalid actions lead to idempotent errors, not glitch states where you lose everything. Indeed, and that's exactly how most cryptocurrencies work today. You try to send funds to an invalid address, the wallet will present you with an error that you cannot do that. The user in the submission did not perform an invalid action, because they wouldn't be able to perform an invalid action.
  - zkldi 5y ago
    So your definition for "valid action" is just that the eth network lets them do it? They clearly didn't want to burn £500k, and that is now irrecoverable, alongside 260 other people who made the same mistake, on a smart contract that forgoes validation for gas fees. How is this not invalid?
    - TimJRobinson 5y ago
      `rm -rf /` is a perfectly valid action, but lots of people still get burnt accidentally running it.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      > So your definition for "valid action" is just that the eth network lets them do it? Yes, this is indeed the definition for "valid", that the protocol allows them to do it. It was a valid action, but not the action the user actually wanted to perform. There are two ways of avoiding these scenarios: A) use UIs and don't interact with the protocol without safeguards, as the UI will prevent you from making mistakes (this user interacted directly with the contract, not via a UI) and B) when doing something involving a lot of money, do it once first with a small percentage, so you can verify it's correct (this user didn't do this either). For example, I know that IBAN has checksum built into the "address" and that the bank could revert transfers, but if I make transfers above a certain sum, I always send a small amount first, make the recipient confirm how much they received (I send a small random sum) and only then do I perform the larger transfer. As I mentioned elsewhere in the comments on this submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30136941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30136941), it's impossible to know if someone actually has access to an address or not, so why would the wallet stop them from sending it?
wbl 5y ago
If this happened at a bank everyone involved would fix it and have a nice laugh the next day.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  If this happened at a bank, you would be told you submitted the wrong form to withdraw foreign currency from your account (closest analog I can think of) and be given the correct form before it even started getting processed.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    A better analogy would be that you sent the money to a bank account you thought belonged to X, but X can no longer prove that they actually are X, so the bank are not allowing them to withdraw the money anymore. Would the bank still send back the money, even though the recipient was technically correct?
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
The thing that gets overlooked here is this guy had to have an above average understanding of all this to even get into a position to make this mistake. Manually sending weth to a contract address is not a process a newbie would even conceive of doing. Or even having weth in the first place. This guy was pretty far over on the right side of the bell curve when it comes to Ethereum knowledge. It's still obviously a giant design gotcha that losing money this way is possible. They fact that it happened to a guy who knew probably 95% of the esoterica he needed to know to complete the transaction successfully and still got completely burned is an issue.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > The thing that gets overlooked here is this guy had to have an above average understanding of all this to even get into a position to make this mistake You'd think so, but you'd be surprised. > This guy was pretty far over on the right side of the bell curve when it comes to Ethereum knowledge. No, that's not true. Even people at the beginning of the bell curve know that you don't send half a million worth of anything around without verifying first that what you're about to do, is correct. You first do that by reading through everything and double-checking. And after that, you do the thing you want to do, but with 1% of the value or less, and verify/double-check again. After that, you do what you actually wanted to do. The ecosystem is very new, has bunch of sharp edges everywhere and there is no recourse if you do anything wrong, so going through this process is something you learn very early on. > They fact that it happened to a guy who knew probably 95% of the esoterica he needed to know to complete the transaction successfully This is obviously not true, as the person seems to not even have search for "How to convert X to Y" before performing something they know they might not be able to undo.
jollybean 5y ago
What % of the people that use IBAN, know that there is a checksum, know what a checksum even is, or how to apply it? Thankfully we have banks to deal with that - and legal framework that can help us undo problems. "But you can use an exchange with ETH!" Like banks? Making such networks ostensibly not 'decentralized'? The entire point of Crypto/Blockchain is that is decentralized and is accessible to everyone. If it requires that we trust 'quasi-centralized nodes' like CoinBase (i.e. banks) then it mostly defeats the purpose. Just use a bank. At absolute minimum, the purveyors of such tech should be providing 'off the shelf' free wallet software that solves all of these problems of magical knowledge. All of these arguments are fading quickly and the people doing this are risking a lot of credibility. We talk about people wasting their time on AdTech, but at least there is actually some value in AdTech. We are facing an entire generation of people doing 'NoTech'. Let's turn this into something useful.
- capableweb 5y ago
  I think you missed that the user went beyond just using something to swap ETH for WETH and instead interacted directly (manually) with the contract, effectively bypassing the safe-guards that are already in place (even without exchanges) to prevent issues. The user basically guessed that this is how you turn ETH into WETH and vice-versa, without actually reading anything about it. If the user searched for "How do I turn ETH into WETH?" and read the first few links, they would have avoided this problem. If they made a mistake of entering an invalid address in a wallet for a transfer, the wallet wouldn't allow the transfer in the first place. > The entire point of Crypto/Blockchain is that is decentralized and is accessible to everyone Yes, indeed. That also implies that you're responsible enough to have a basic understanding of what you're doing. Or at least recognize that you don't have a basic understanding, and seek to attain one when needed.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    It doesn't really matter that 'someone did something they should not'. People will always press the Magic Red Button without knowing what it does with some, if rare, consistency. That's human nature, ergo, our systems must accommodate. The fact it's possible to lose $500K whereupon 'nothing can be done about it' is a 'dealbreaker' for this tech. The truth is, when one goes down the rabbit hole, one discovers that ETH doesn't really solve any problems and creates a bunch of problematic side-effects. When you solve those side-effects you end up with something that looks like a regulated banking system. There needs to be a new angle/twist or use case that we haven't thought of yet, in order for any of this to make sense. We risk getting into accidents when we drive a car, because the 'upside' of fast travel is worth the risk. There's just no real upside with Crypto yet. NFT was a neat idea, but that's not it either.

kuhewa 5y ago

Currencies don't come with a prerequisite of intimate knowledge of industrial jargon that requires use on a daily basis to be proficient enough in to not lose everything.

nicbou 5y ago
I've been paying attention to this whole thing for a few years, and I still can't tell how I could send coins to a friend if I had them.
noduerme 5y ago
Also, chemistry sets come with a lot of graphic warnings.
- aniforprez 5y ago
  Do we need a "hot coffee is hot" warning label on every crypto transaction? And yes I'm aware the lady in the case suffered and it's terrible. I'm just being facetious
  - kuhewa 5y ago
    If it is ever going to solve a fraction of the societal ills promised, yeah sounds like it will need that warning.
  - IgorPartola 5y ago
    Oh come on. This is clearly a terrible system design choice and should have never been codified.
capableweb 5y ago
If you're gonna deal directly with the forex industry without any safe-guards there will definitely be a bunch of jargon around, have you ever dealt with the insides of forex trading before? In general, giving someone money does not require intimate knowledge of what's happening behind the scenes, that's true. But the submission is not about a normal transfer, the user is explicitly avoiding the safe-guards in place, and got burned by it. It's no surprise really.
- kuhewa 5y ago
  > have you ever dealt with the insides of forex trading before? Why, is there a way to send currency directly and irrecoverably into a paper shredder on the inside?
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Do you actually understand what happened in this case? No one sent any currencies into a "shredder", so not sure why you're asking this question?
    - hootbootscoot 5y ago
      an immutable black hole might as well be a shredder. the OP in the reddit did precisely that. that money is GONE. locked away forever. it has not been transferred to anyone else.
      - capableweb 5y ago
        Indeed, an "immutable black hole" could be described as a shredder, agree. But that's not what that address is. The semi-official "black hole" address for Ethereum is 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (https://etherscan.io/address/0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000000000000000000000000...), currently has $29,461,295.02 worth of ETH in it. Any other (valid) address is just another address on the network.

sshine 5y ago

Or like sticking the wrong plastic card into an ATM and observe the machine eat the card... and your bank account. You'd expect that invalid actions lead to idempotent errors, not glitch states where you lose everything.

capableweb 5y ago
> You'd expect that invalid actions lead to idempotent errors, not glitch states where you lose everything. Indeed, and that's exactly how most cryptocurrencies work today. You try to send funds to an invalid address, the wallet will present you with an error that you cannot do that. The user in the submission did not perform an invalid action, because they wouldn't be able to perform an invalid action.
- zkldi 5y ago
  So your definition for "valid action" is just that the eth network lets them do it? They clearly didn't want to burn £500k, and that is now irrecoverable, alongside 260 other people who made the same mistake, on a smart contract that forgoes validation for gas fees. How is this not invalid?
  - TimJRobinson 5y ago
    `rm -rf /` is a perfectly valid action, but lots of people still get burnt accidentally running it.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    > So your definition for "valid action" is just that the eth network lets them do it? Yes, this is indeed the definition for "valid", that the protocol allows them to do it. It was a valid action, but not the action the user actually wanted to perform. There are two ways of avoiding these scenarios: A) use UIs and don't interact with the protocol without safeguards, as the UI will prevent you from making mistakes (this user interacted directly with the contract, not via a UI) and B) when doing something involving a lot of money, do it once first with a small percentage, so you can verify it's correct (this user didn't do this either). For example, I know that IBAN has checksum built into the "address" and that the bank could revert transfers, but if I make transfers above a certain sum, I always send a small amount first, make the recipient confirm how much they received (I send a small random sum) and only then do I perform the larger transfer. As I mentioned elsewhere in the comments on this submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30136941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30136941), it's impossible to know if someone actually has access to an address or not, so why would the wallet stop them from sending it?

wbl 5y ago

If this happened at a bank everyone involved would fix it and have a nice laugh the next day.

HWR_14 5y ago
If this happened at a bank, you would be told you submitted the wrong form to withdraw foreign currency from your account (closest analog I can think of) and be given the correct form before it even started getting processed.
- capableweb 5y ago
  A better analogy would be that you sent the money to a bank account you thought belonged to X, but X can no longer prove that they actually are X, so the bank are not allowing them to withdraw the money anymore. Would the bank still send back the money, even though the recipient was technically correct?

TigeriusKirk 5y ago

The thing that gets overlooked here is this guy had to have an above average understanding of all this to even get into a position to make this mistake. Manually sending weth to a contract address is not a process a newbie would even conceive of doing. Or even having weth in the first place. This guy was pretty far over on the right side of the bell curve when it comes to Ethereum knowledge. It's still obviously a giant design gotcha that losing money this way is possible. They fact that it happened to a guy who knew probably 95% of the esoterica he needed to know to complete the transaction successfully and still got completely burned is an issue.

capableweb 5y ago
> The thing that gets overlooked here is this guy had to have an above average understanding of all this to even get into a position to make this mistake You'd think so, but you'd be surprised. > This guy was pretty far over on the right side of the bell curve when it comes to Ethereum knowledge. No, that's not true. Even people at the beginning of the bell curve know that you don't send half a million worth of anything around without verifying first that what you're about to do, is correct. You first do that by reading through everything and double-checking. And after that, you do the thing you want to do, but with 1% of the value or less, and verify/double-check again. After that, you do what you actually wanted to do. The ecosystem is very new, has bunch of sharp edges everywhere and there is no recourse if you do anything wrong, so going through this process is something you learn very early on. > They fact that it happened to a guy who knew probably 95% of the esoterica he needed to know to complete the transaction successfully This is obviously not true, as the person seems to not even have search for "How to convert X to Y" before performing something they know they might not be able to undo.

jollybean 5y ago

What % of the people that use IBAN, know that there is a checksum, know what a checksum even is, or how to apply it? Thankfully we have banks to deal with that - and legal framework that can help us undo problems. "But you can use an exchange with ETH!" Like banks? Making such networks ostensibly not 'decentralized'? The entire point of Crypto/Blockchain is that is decentralized and is accessible to everyone. If it requires that we trust 'quasi-centralized nodes' like CoinBase (i.e. banks) then it mostly defeats the purpose. Just use a bank. At absolute minimum, the purveyors of such tech should be providing 'off the shelf' free wallet software that solves all of these problems of magical knowledge. All of these arguments are fading quickly and the people doing this are risking a lot of credibility. We talk about people wasting their time on AdTech, but at least there is actually some value in AdTech. We are facing an entire generation of people doing 'NoTech'. Let's turn this into something useful.

capableweb 5y ago
I think you missed that the user went beyond just using something to swap ETH for WETH and instead interacted directly (manually) with the contract, effectively bypassing the safe-guards that are already in place (even without exchanges) to prevent issues. The user basically guessed that this is how you turn ETH into WETH and vice-versa, without actually reading anything about it. If the user searched for "How do I turn ETH into WETH?" and read the first few links, they would have avoided this problem. If they made a mistake of entering an invalid address in a wallet for a transfer, the wallet wouldn't allow the transfer in the first place. > The entire point of Crypto/Blockchain is that is decentralized and is accessible to everyone Yes, indeed. That also implies that you're responsible enough to have a basic understanding of what you're doing. Or at least recognize that you don't have a basic understanding, and seek to attain one when needed.
- jollybean 5y ago
  It doesn't really matter that 'someone did something they should not'. People will always press the Magic Red Button without knowing what it does with some, if rare, consistency. That's human nature, ergo, our systems must accommodate. The fact it's possible to lose $500K whereupon 'nothing can be done about it' is a 'dealbreaker' for this tech. The truth is, when one goes down the rabbit hole, one discovers that ETH doesn't really solve any problems and creates a bunch of problematic side-effects. When you solve those side-effects you end up with something that looks like a regulated banking system. There needs to be a new angle/twist or use case that we haven't thought of yet, in order for any of this to make sense. We risk getting into accidents when we drive a car, because the 'upside' of fast travel is worth the risk. There's just no real upside with Crypto yet. NFT was a neat idea, but that's not it either.