>> Wow why didn't the contract creators think this through and block requests to the contract
> Because adding that check would increase the cost of every user transaction. All AMM swaps would be done with WETH so it’s the right call to not have it in there
A design which actively discourages robust programming and error handling in financial software. Wow.
Want validation? Other people don't want to pay for stuff they're not validating... so it's on you to be careful.
Accidentally fuck up? Not our problem, that's on you for not calling the right API.
Want your money back? We're not paying money to cover for other people's mistakes. You're on your own bud.
Idk why people conflate libertarianism with this hyper-individualist stuff. It really isn’t the case.
Of course a lot of people noticed. The problem is that cryptocurrencies are currently primarily functioning as investment object rather than an actual secure financial ledger, which is why the interest of investors will trump purity.
The half million was a fair and just transfer. Whoever is the recipient is fully deserving both morally and ethically of their new-found wealth.
If I was on the receiving end of this transaction, I’d thank the sender for the money and move on with my life. Of course I’d never be in the position to receive the funds because I’m not stupid enough to play this game—odds are very good I would be the one who sent half a million dollars by mistake!
I mean, I think I’m joking but not really. If you want to practice “code is law” and really mean it, this is the kinds of stuff that will happen.
It ought to be possible to craft an insurance policy that would pay out the $500k (or equivalent WETH/ETH) in cases like the one in this article, where the transparency of the ledger clearly shows that the tokens are unrecoverable.
As insurance companies are notorious for declining to pay out, the clear evidence trail would be helpful to allow the insuree to take the claim to a regular court for a human decision on its validity.
An insurer that knows when it doesn't have a case and will be forced to pay (plus costs) when there's clear evidence of coverage and loss will almost always pay without a fight.
However if there are high-value decisions which are not so clear cut, then having the option to go to court or some other mediation system to settle is quite useful. One of the critisms of "code is law" is the lack of mechanism for nuanced, human intervention when something unexpected happens due to a bug, design flaw or unexpected consequence that turns out to be unreasonable.
Ahahahahahha. Ahahahahahahahahahha. Ahahahahahhahahahahahahahah.
--- several minutes of laughter later ---
Markets don't care and they will not fix these issues, because suckers losing money is a much better market proposition than losing money on customer support.
Fo go ahead and learn some history, will you? Almost every single regulation we have in place is precisely because markets never ever fix things.
And no amount of mocking faux laughter will change that.
BTW I never had success trying to chargeback VISA for services that were not delivered. Scammers do it without problem though.
Crypto combines the worst properties of cash and wire payment into a package that has no customer protection and is almost tailor made for scammers.
You are indeed renting a machine to run some code, and if you want many people to use your code you want to make it cheap. There's a trade off.
You can fuck up things on the BTC blockchain too, "burning" crypto by sending it to a dead address has been a thing for a long time.
It always seemed stupid to me that it was possible, compared to sending money to an invalid IBAN, but I'm not a crypto enthusiast so I may be biased.
Of course you can do both things, which is why catastrophic financial ruin is a daily fear when dealing with cryptocurrencies.
https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-find-my-Bitcoin-cash-that-I-...
Giving a person control over the funds allocated to their smart contract probably opens holes where they can steal the smart contract's money, though obviously creating software that handles money and can't be updated is its own kettle of fish.
We can point and laugh at this one person, but according to the reddit thread they're the 265th person to make this mistake, and more than half of the money in the inaccessible account is not theirs.
No one gets everything right the first time, but with a lot of testing, you can actually write software that does exactly what you think it will do, and you can achieve pretty cool stuff. Remember that humans wrote the software that took humanity to the moon!
What you describe are dry runs.
Just like the people writing the computer that took us to the moon, I'm pretty sure they tried it before in small-scale simulations before hooking it up to the rocket and letting it go to the moon.
The incentive was robust code that would work well, get it done, go to the moon.
Here, machine time is expensive, puts emphasis on code that works, but just barely...
Let's just say NASA would check for the "yup, you are gonna burn some money" case, and reject it.
I think that people are so unlikely to fuck this up that such a check would be rather pointless.
Money matters a lot. Should this mess endure, people will forever be saying a little bit of gas would have been worth it.
And we've people with six figure arguments as to why such a check makes sense.
The idea of minimal code, focused on speed coupled with financials leads me FAR away from all this.
I will watch with great interest and entertainment.
Yeah, because NASA has been utterly fucked by the congress. Because of politics it's better for NASA to spend 5x the money on 1 reliable spacecraft than to build 5 slightly less reliable spacecraft out of which only 1 fails.
Even if the economics of it don't make sense, NASA can't afford to be seen failing because because politicians will not want to fund them.
I guess my point is that NASA is an exceptionally badly managed entity, not something you'd want to aspire to. (Of course the people working at NASA are not the ones to blame for this.)
>Money matters a lot. Should this mess endure, people will forever be saying a little bit of gas would have been worth it.
That gas would probably add up to more money than has been lost here.
>And we've people with six figure arguments as to why such a check makes sense.
The gas fees of such a check would probably be higher than the losses averted, especially in the long run. And any "losses" are essentially distributed among all ETH holders anyway.
This is also how high toxicity systems get made.
It would be stupid to put these checks in the contract, they would be very expensive and only help people using unsuitable client software.
You feel all client software will be suitable?
I don't. There is NO WAY. Lots of people will do ANYTHING for a bit of margin, hoping for volume.
Of course not. There will be more advanced software for expert users that allows them to manually create potentially riskier transactions. That's perfectly fine.
Client software targeting end-users should have such checks.
You only one need one wallet software to be the official WETH-approved client, sucks for anyone else risking their money with unsupported software.
We shall see. And for me, safely and at a distance.
Frankly, the small cost of robustness in contracts should have been factored in from the beginning. It just does not need to be so damn lean and rickety.
The incentives are wrong here.
My prediction is the current state of affairs all gets ripped up and replaced after a time. And until that happens, we are likely to see activity largely limited to people who have a healthy appetite for risk.
Perhaps it all is as it should be too. Had the reverse been done, emphasis on slightly more expensive contracts that are robust and able to deny the costly errors, I would imagine others clamoring for people to adopt the rock bottom lean stacks...
What it won't all be is dull, will it?
>Frankly, the small cost of robustness in contracts should have been factored in from the beginning. It just does not need to be so damn lean and rickety.
It really doesn't seem necessary, more complicated contracts require custom frontends to interact with anyway.
How come such a check is so damn expensive?
It should not be.
Clearly Ethereum is far from a ready product, but I think we can expect to see massive improvements when proof of stake goes live this year.
The user was not doing a normal transfer (at least, they didn't want to, but they ended up doing). They didn't know what they were doing at all, a simply Google search would have showed them the way. Using UIs instead of interacting with the contract directly would have prevented them from making the mistake they did. Doing a small test transfer before doing the big one would have revealed what was wrong as well.
It's not that I'm comparing writing software for moon missions with making cryptocurrency transactions. I was directly replying to mox1 implying that writing 100% correct code is impossible and shouldn't be attempted.
That is how high toxicity systems get made.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2019/07/16/apollo-11...
There are 0 do-overs on smart contracts in production. No stopping the network for a minute to triage, no rolling back a minute, no circuit breakers. No "Error 1202, do you want to continue?" pop-up messages.
Try sending cryptocurrency to an invalid address and you'll see that the wallet will reject sending it, just like email bouncing.
A “valid” address locking up funds sent to it without recourse is /dev/null.
Simply said: you cannot send funds to invalid addresses on Ethereum.
A protocol could conceivably require the recipient to verify they're holding the private key for the address before the transaction can take place.
Yet here we are.
The user in the submission did not send funds to a invalid address. The address is valid, as otherwise funds wouldn't be able to be sent to it (the wallet would not allow you, nor the protocol, nor the miner/validators). The address happens to belong to a contract, that can also hold funds, similarly to accounts.
Now, every address/account/contract has a private-key behind it, that allows the owner of the private-key to transfer out of the address/account/contract, but it's impossible to know if the owner actually still has the private-key.
Similarly to how you can't know if john@example.com actually has access to his email account (maybe he forgot his password?), you can't know if an address actually has the possibility of moving the funds out of the address, as the private-key can have been thrown/forgotten/lost.
The stakes are a little bit higher when you’re sending money instead of emails.
Why doesn't it count and why does it matter how Gmail works behind the scenes?
Obviously the person you replied to meant invalid in the sense of “not intended to receive funds”
It would have been a competent design decision for a system to require some type of initial registration of intent to receive funds for an address in order for a transaction to post.
The same thing was done on the bitcoin chain, e.g. counterparty[0] was relying on a "proof of burn" which was basically "Send BTC to a black hole".
There's a reason some contracts (in the regular legal world) are illegal.
Wait... so the tokens are really still there, just inaccessible? In what way do the tokens still exist? What makes them inaccessible? Is there really no possibility of restoring the tokens? No possibility of cleverly hacking them out with the assumed myriad of unpublished security flaws?
... Reminds me of another financial infrastructure I know.
... Lest anyone ever think Blockchain tech is somehow immune to network effects and social considerations.
But, yes, blockchain stuff is fundamentally based on consensus about what the rules are, and people/organizations with more social influence can [...] .
This is just a dumbass user doing dumbass things. This is basic-level stuff right here. Don't interact with contracts directly unless you 100% know what you're doing.
We can even see this with the criticism of wire fraud. Wire fraud is a huge fucking mess that occasionally costs people their life savings. The entire setup is rightly criticized (heck, even by the crypto community) for having users interact with a highly error-prone system with huge consequences.
This is qualitatively different from crypto that allows you to burn your money on accident, while the people who build the infrastructure for this tell you is a smart, safe place to put your money.
But also, wiring money is a thing that laypeople almost never do. It’s nerve wracking to wire money. But the equivalent in cryptocurrency is just how it’s done. Every transaction is just a fuckup with no recourse waiting to happen.
You can dump money into a pit just as easy with the classic banking system. Where I live (EU), wiring money is the primary way of payments and money transfers. People don't use anything else.
Seems like it essentially was. He exchanged ETH for WETH in exactly the same way. Assuming that the reverse would work (as opposed to destroying the money) was not an unreasonable step. He still screwed up, but a design that allows this is user hostile and stupid.
> You can dump money into a pit just as easy with the classic banking system. Where I live (EU), wiring money…
In the US at least, you can get your money back through the legal system. Accidentally dropping your money into someone else’s account does not give them a right to it and for substantial amounts of money people can and do get their money back.
For this amount of money I’d consider pursuing legal avenues against the developers of Etherium. This design seems borderline negligent and Etherium has modified the code at least once already to force a refund.
> In the US at least, you can get your money back through the legal system. Accidentally dropping your money into someone else’s account does not give them a right to it and for substantial amounts of money people can and do get their money back.
I doubt this is true in the case of uncooperative out-of-country second party - yeah they have no right to the money, but they don't care and the legal system won't do much for you.
I still find the wire transfer comparison lacking, mostly because one shitty design does not justify another.
Of course one shitty design doesn't justify another, but the point is not justification but a reply to all the people saying "this is way worse than and would never happen with the traditional banking" that they are wrong. I agree that better UX is needed.
Regarding your point about legal action against Ethereum designers, well... That'd be like pursuing legal action against the designers of your web browser because it allows you to open phishing sites. Nonsense IMHO.
I tend to agree. Dumbasses clearly designed this system if it allows money to be accidentally destroyed. Dumbasses doing dumbass things indeed.
But if you use any of the exchanges you described, you have to trust that they 100% know what they're doing.
It seems safer to avoid smart contracts and cryptocurrencies altogether.