While I accept it's a tradeoff where other people might take another view, this is type of thing is why I personally don't want to put money into blockchains.
I want mistakes to be fixable, by going to court if necessary, rather than money just being lost forever because I mistyped a character and "computer says no".
Much like a real world contract between - say - you and a bank when they accept your deposit, a smart contract should contain code provisions to revert the funds back to their owner if a certain set of circumstances happens in the environment (i.e. in the blockchain).
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.
And in banks, all your money can be frozen by a hostile government, for example.
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).
Might be doable to reverse transactions on exchanges, which operate like banks and will do 'shadow' transactions, because e.g. the Bitcoin blockchain can only handle a handful of real transactions per second.
This is fixable with escrows (which etherum has on-chain I think). It's just not very used right now. Although this is about participating in contracts themselves so this is more akin to a bug in the escrow.
Its in an account which isn’t owned by any person - the account of a “contract”, a computer program made to accept money and send it out based on a set of rules. Unfortunately for this person, the program’s rules don’t let it send back out the kind of currency he added. It’s like if you tried to drop off Euros at an American bank and instead of telling you they don’t accept Euros, they put it in the cash register and, when you asked for it back, told you they can’t give out Euros. The question is whether someone can figure out how to modify the program to accept more currencies (even though the program was designed to be immutable).
The smart contract is a small bit of code (and storage) that lives on the blockchain. It lives at an address, hence why tokens can be sent to it.
Unfortunately, the smart contract has no way of transferring the tokens out, and it can't be upgraded. Therefore the tokens are locked in there forever.
It's basically in limbo. The recipient contract isn't setup to receive funds from that chain, but it is a valid address. The recipient from a quick scan of the content appears to be immutable so it can never be updated to "receive" the funds.
It was never 'there' to begin with, so it's not like that, really.
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".)
This is one of very few reasons why having centralised banks is going to be necessary. Whether the pros of having banks outweigh the cons decentralised currencies, is yet to be determined. Personally, I still don't believe they do.
Anyway, the usual bank transaction care should still apply, especially _because_ there is no central authority to reverse charges. Normally when I send money to anyone, I check it first by sending a small amount, then I get confirmation that it's received, then I'll send the rest.
I don't know if such a precaution would have made sense in this scenario (as I don't know enough about LINK or smart contracts for that matter), but it's something that I take especially serious when transacting large amounts in crypto currencies.
What you are said contradicts all of my current life experience. Established banks are very good at handling reversed charges in the case of mistakes, fraud, and ESPECIALLY glitches. In the case of a glitch, banks _do_ have authorities that can mutate the system to fix things.
Now, I don't have experience with very large sums of cash, but I own a house and I have opened and closed a few investment accounts. I never felt the need to sent test payments through the system first. If the bank had screwed up, I'm sure it would have been a lot of trouble to fix, but it would have been fixable, no doubt.
I send test payments through the tubes first when a big one is following. I want to remove the risk of typos for the real payments, so I want the receiver already keyed in with an account that I have already used > once. The stress of having to fill out admin for a big payout gone awry is too much to risk for a few days of expedience.
Well, it is also possible to send money to the wrong account number by bank transfer. In that case the banks also generally say that they cannot do anything about it.
I don't think this is true. I think usually an obvious error like a large sum sent to an incorrect account is reversible. Though certain specific transactions such as wires are harder to recover than others such as intrabank transfers.
Yes, which you go through a governance system (our legal system) to recover it. Crypto governance works similarly where it exists in varied forms (e.g. replace the contract or hard fork).
It’s not mature yet but the parallels exist and crypto’s will continue to develop.
Wow: "the implementation is the battle-tested standard OpenZeppelin ERC20 contract...Chainlink added a few functions to support ERC-677...here's a ray of hope since the contract that owns the funds is a proxy (implemented as @mudgen's Diamond)... If you could somehow get the proxy to register the transfer function of the Chainlink contract as a diamond facet, you (or anyone else) would then be able to call it via the proxy and move the funds as if you were the owner. Aavegotchi, as any diamond, has an admin interface for changing registered functions, called IDiamondCut."
Cryptocurrency is gonna need its own Certified Public Accountants.
If the Aveegotchi person is based in a jurisdictions with laws that would be favorable, one solution is to sue him. You could make the argument that he should return the money (and that creating a computer program which was unable to allow him to do so was his own fault).
It’s a similar fact pattern to Citigroup v. Brigade Capital Management (which seems like it could go in Citigroup’s favor).
Of course it seems like the Aveegotchi person is being really nice about this so I don’t think it would be right to sue him, but if I’d just lost my whole life savings maybe I’d think differently.
You may be right... But I would hope a court would rule that "I was experimenting with this other guys computer code and it ate my money" wouldn't lead to liability for the author of the code unless the loss can proved to be either deliberate or limited to the gain of the author (rather than the loss of the victim).
It seems like this is an issue of tooling, no? If crypto by definition is to be without governance, and contracts are immutable, then you better use some damn good tools/services to make sure transfers and contracts are setup and executed correctly. Any type of silly mistake like this should be made practically impossible, since it's inherently irreversible by design.
So was this guy just playing around with manual setups? Or is that perhaps the only way to do things?
I think crypto requires low level interactions for things like this. Tooling is good for abstracting payments, but if you're using it and don't understand what's happening under the hood there are so many pitfalls.
This is a sad story and a good example of why the much-ballyhooed immutability of cryptocurrency transactions is an anti-feature for the vast majority of users.
I have waded into crypto twice. Both times I have lost access and the funds are gone. I don't care what happens with Bitcoin, I'm staying away from it.
Nope. Literally just wired money to a wrong account number (banker mistyped one digit). It was sent back. Sure, if you get tricked into wiring to a fraudster, they can keep your money. However, nothing in the banking system is like this unless you put your money as cash in a bag and burn it.
No you wouldn't. You could almost certainly recover the money.
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.
Thankfully, accidentally transferring money abroad is not trivial. It being not user friendly is an advantage there. It often takes time to process as well, so while it's still pending you can undo the transfer.
Over here, for a European transfer you need to fill in an IBAN number, which contains the country code of the destination. The transfer will fail as well if you don't provide the right name with the number.
For international transfers, you need to provide even more information like BIC numbers, etc.
With crypto, it's a random address. If you or someone else manipulates the address by even a single bit, it's gone.
Two things: It is quite hard to wire money to the wrong address. There are a lot of checks and I have been quite impressed with every bank I have dealt with being diligent in ringing me up to confirm the details, even for relatively small amounts.
Secondly, unless the destination person/organization is actually criminal, reversing a mistake is usually a phone call/polite letter away. If that fails then the legal system is there.
I guess wiring money to a criminal by mistake is possible but it seems unlikely. Deliberately wiring money to a criminal is very possible but you are on your own there. And even then it should be possible to track them down using the destination bank account unless the bank itself is shady.
Crypto has all of the disadvantages of wiring money (I guess it is usually cheaper) with none of the advantages.
I can no longer find a good source, but I believe in the Citigroup case, they owed that money, it is just that instead of making a standard monthly payment, they paid a large fraction (maybe even all?) of what was owed. That's quite different from sending money into the ether/random recipient. That makes matters substantially more difficult.
Correction: Citigroup didn't owe the money, they were acting on behalf of Revlon, who owed the money.
Nope; banks can and will reverse transfers, and if the money was transferred fraudulently, THEY will take the blame for it (because in essence their security failed, even if you are the one that initiated the transfer). Banks have a fund to compensate victims, and banks are connected to national and international banks and regulatory bodies (like the ECB) to get you out of shit creek if there is a problem.
Banks are not perfect, but at least they pay up if you run into one of those imperfections. Usually.
Banks (especially banks in the same country) can send funds back, that's not the same thing as reversing the transfer. Both SEPA and SWIFT transfers are irreversible. It's even possible to steal money from a central bank by transferring money away with SWIFT.
The only real difference is that it's not legal to keep mistakenly sent funds, making irreversible mistakes less likely to happen.
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.
Funny that this makes it to HN's front page as BTCUSD touches an all time high.
Maybe the OP is trying to do some sort of indirect PSA on the dangers of crypto?
[edit]: in which case, here's another PSA: you can have freedom or safety. Having both is pretty darn hard. However, having the illusion that you have both is fairly commonplace.
The most downvoted comment in the Github issue seems totally right.. why did this guy put his life savings in a crypto? Even without making any mistake this seems like a dumb move.
Nitpicking slightly, but "OP" is whoever started the thread in the forum where it is being discussed, not whomever wrote the original article. Only saying this because it keeps getting misused here on HN.
A non-diversified portfolio is the predominant risk factor here. This guy lost his life savings in crypto, while other people poured everything into Worldcom, their dream home in Miami, etc. Crypto might be riskier than those classes of asset, and its evangelists might be at fault for encouraging first-time investors to make potentially ruinous bets -- but the story of people becoming overly invested, emotionally and financially, in the new hot thing is much older than ethereum.
It was also in poor taste to scold him on the GH issue. It can wait, poor guy is just asking for help.
Bug trackers are no place to even post the sort of message that OP posted to begin with. Once you permit that, then all bets are off on trying to keep out stuff that's "off topic".
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)
If watching someone lose $50k USD equivalent doesn't prevent someone else from doing this sort of thing, a random internet meanie will definitely not dissuade them.
Random internet meanie aside, if this happened to a friend or a family member, I would absolutely try to explain to them that they were an idiot for putting their life savings into crypto in the first place.
Ever thought about that its simply not true?
He wants help to get a significant amount of money back.
People do everything in such a situation including making up a story that gets the maximum attention.
Maybe it really was all his savings but lets assume it was only halve of it the story would almost certainly read exactly the same.
> why did this guy put his life savings in a crypto
Good point, (which was my first reaction.)
But consider this: If, when you were young, you bought a few $1000 of Microsoft stock, Apple stock, Google stock, ect, when they went public, that investment could have grown to be the majority of your life savings.
Perhaps dawidkabani13 just happened to buy some tokens at the right time? A lot of people don't save.
Otherwise, this is a good example of why dumping all of your life savings into cryptocurrency is irresponsible.
Part of managing an investment portfolio is making sure it remains suitably balanced.
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".
> But consider this: If, when you were young, you bought a few $1000 of Microsoft stock, Apple stock, Google stock, ect, when they went public, that investment could have grown to be the majority of your life savings.
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.
I suppose that would be an example of "easy come, easy go" similar to if someone rode a stock way up and then it crashed. It does make sense to lock in profits at some point but, of course, you may not maximize your profits that way. Certainly there are stocks I've made modest gains of that would have been big wins had I held.
Let's put aside the comparison of cryptos and stocks for now.
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.
"You didn't learn. In what universe do you think a small mistake like that could crush your entire life? Not to mention all the hacks and scams threats. I am not sorry anymore for you, you seem irresponsible."
I agree with you, I hope OP doesn't have a wife and children. He's totally careless and men cannot afford to be careless.
Obviously putting some % of your savings into it can be rational, but putting 100% of your savings in a volatile security just isn't wise.
>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.
It sounds dumb to you (and to me for that matter), but plenty of people have made a lot money like that (and plenty who have lost it). Regardless, neither me, you, or the down voted commenter are in a position to tell him he's dumb for doing it. Maybe there is good reason, maybe there isn't, it's not up to us to tell him he's right or wrong in this scenario.
I'm not validating a bad decision. I'm saying that we don't know anything about why he made that decision, and until we do, we have no right to judge him for it.
It being a dumb decision is a reasonable null hypothesis. Sure maybe someone held a gun to his head and forced him to put his life savings into ethereum, but there's no reason to believe that to be the case.
Why would interest in irrational exuberance for a commodity with no intrinsic value supersede posts about serious failings of the technology?
Pretty hard to wax on about how crypto is the future of retail finance in a thread about someone who lost their life savings with no recourse due to a typo. Could’ve just gone to the bank if this was fiat.
I disagree with some parts of MMT, and with most orthodox or neokeynesian economists (i think DICE was the model that made me think "well they're mostly just idiots" and stop reading economists papers, and Nordhaus nobel prize just made me feel even less respect for the profession). So i'm really not in the economist/MMT camp. But any deflationary money can only facilitate trade, and nothing else. You can't build on this.
Crypto was exiting and, a hundred desillusion later, is still interesting for most people here, but BTC breaking 20k is (at least for me) just boring. It was interesting to know it reached the previous peak at 18k, but 20k, 25k, 30k... Its deflationnary, so of course it will go up. You can't pay taxes with it, you can't loan it, you can't invest it on the primary market. It's boring money.
While I don't think crypto is the wisest place to vest oneself, I think you could flippantly say this about a lot of financial instruments over the years.
I think that is sound advice. I think it's very unlikely however that all people will happen upon that advice and agree that it is sound. Especially unlikely with an entire industry of financial sales people who have a vested interest in selling all kind of financial products.
And here: https://twitter.com/mudgen/status/1338967176968069127