And here: https://twitter.com/mudgen/status/1338967176968069127
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".
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).
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.
Cryptocurrency is gonna need its own Certified Public Accountants.
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.
So was this guy just playing around with manual setups? Or is that perhaps the only way to do things?
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.
With money transfers, one should always send a small amount and confirm receipt, rather then sending giant amounts ?
But if it's your life savings, put it in an index fund and forget about it for a few decades.
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 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.
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1BitcoinEaterAddressD...
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.
(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.
It was also in poor taste to scold him on the GH issue. It can wait, poor guy is just asking for help.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It is, until said crypto triples in value. Then not so much.
Some people have been known to bet the farm on the red at roulette.
That's a dumb move indeed, unless you win of course.
>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.
Do we have a good word that covers both the author of the post or the OP of the linked thread?
That might prove more difficult than you'd think.
>Neither company explained to CNBC how they were able to recover the stolen funds. In most cases, they’re lost forever.
Granted, that is still losing money irreversibly, but it's not the same thing.
But when it comes to investing, a little knowledge of economics and a good sense of smell goes a long way.
maybe, but good luck prosecuting/recovering it if it's outside your country's jurisdiction.
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.
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.
Correction: Citigroup didn't owe the money, they were acting on behalf of Revlon, who owed the money.