I lost all my savings in a mistaken Ethereum transaction

For example there could be, as part of the contract, much like there are exceptional provisions in real world contract, a M-of-N sig allowing the funds to be reverted back to the sender if enough (M) people agree that it's the correct thing to do.

This particular contract didn't seem to have any such provisions, which made it very unsafe.

Current smart contracts aren't very sophisticated yet, this is still the stone age for programmable money.

Things will improve, but in the meantime ... be safe out there.

Diversification.

I DO keep all my money in Western financial institutions, but that's laziness, not out of some misguided perception of stability. If I were optimizing, I'd have some in US institutions, some abroad, some in land, some in blockchain, some in gold, etc.

The US has had a nice 250-year run. Past performance doesn't always predict future performance, and more importantly, if I live 100 years, that means the US has been around for 2.5 of my lifetimes. I think that's a good indicator of the level of stability. There's perhaps a 1-in-2 chance of some major event within my lifetime, consider things like the American Revolution, Civil War, or Great Depression to be major events.

Not all of those would wipe out my assets, but I'd say about a 1:5 chance of my assets being neutered or neutralized within my life.

We tend to plan for the common, minor stuff (typo, guy loses $50k), and overlook big, rare events (like the current, entirely predictable pandemic).

It's like he said, "Hey, let's play a game. Right now, everyone agrees I should have 50k quatloos to do something with. (That's not the game; that's a fact and the premise going into the game.) The game is this: I'll write a note, and let's all agree that ultimately I will no longer have 50k quatloos after I publish the note, okay?" In fact, it's so much like that, that that's pretty much what it is.

(Getting it "back" is a matter of getting everyone to agree that "okay, now you have the 50k quatloos again".)

It might be recoverable, but would require extraordinary efforts.

(The others are wrong amount and duplicate transactions.)

You should transfer to be stopped or reversed as fast as possible. If it can't be done, receiving bank can freeze the funds.

Sometimes the person who receives the money may be held liable if they just spend large sums of money that were transferred to their account.

Having money that is almost entirely usable "correctly", but that with enough effort can be changed slightly in some cases is often useful.

This is the harsh reality of "zero trust" cryptocurrencies, but I think it's often one that is overlooked by proponents.

It’s not mature yet but the parallels exist and crypto’s will continue to develop.

If you wire money to the wrong place, and that person won't return it, that's theft. Likewise, if someone suddenly receives an unexpected million dollars in the account, they should not consider spending it -- that would be a big mistake.

Banks are not perfect, but at least they pay up if you run into one of those imperfections. Usually.

I mean hell, when I was in the UK our landlord gave us the wrong banking info and we were paying for 6 months to the wrong account! I don't know how our landlords went 6 months without knowing they weren't getting paid.. but once they told us I called the bank and they were able to contact the owner of the account it was going into and pull the funds back to the correct account.

Now sure if the owner of this "wrong" account was doing something sketchy it would have been more complicated, but there still would have been as full of recourse as possible. It's not your money just because the bank puts wrong money in your acct.

And sure wire's are a bit more complicated..

But yeah- end of the day the banks are able to do something if it's legit.

I do hope he gets his money back, but he deserves some chiding as well.

Dealing with people is sometimes annoying. Give anyone anything with a text box attached to a carrier than can convey a message, and it will devolve into people treating it like email or a general purpose message board(). Such is life in the GitHubiverse.

(even ostensibly smart people who should be capable of dealing with semantic nuance, like people who write code)

Where else would you leave such a warning if not in the actual thread?

If you bought $100 of crypto back in 2008, then when the price swung rapidly and it became a substantial proportion of your net worth, you probably should have thought "I only invested a token amount as a joke. Has anything changed since then? If not, I should sell all except the token amount I actually intend to own".

And if you did it in lots of other promising stocks at the same time, it would have been a major error.

If you have reliable information from the future, sure, it makes sense to dump your life's savings into one basket that is going to pay off. Or if you are young and your “life’s savings” is a trivial fraction of even your annual surplus income, it might make some sense to take an all-in risk speculatively. But, generally, it's a bad idea.

It is absolutely valid to do risky investments. Just as others have written you don't do them with your live savings. I really thought people would know that by now.

>That's a dumb move indeed, unless you win of course.

No, betting everything you own on red when playing roulette is still a dumb move even if you win. Sometimes you can still be lucky while being dumb, but that's it. Similarly, it's dumb to wrestle a grizzly bear on a bet, even if you come out alive and win the bet.

But if it's your life savings, put it in an index fund and forget about it for a few decades.