There are a few stories on the ThisIsMoney (UK's Daily Mail's money rag) front page right now about relatively convincing and sophisticated scams where people were robbed of thousands.
The average person isn't ready for the risk of crypto.
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/beatthescammers/article-...
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/beatthescammers/article-...
It also shows how many of these scams can be defeated with a few simple precautions. Most of them would be defeated by calling the bank back… in other words don’t answer your phone, make all your calls outgoing. Others are defeated by simply not doing anything hastily and under duress (like urgently wiring all your money to an external account for “safekeeping”).
Yeah, but in today's traditional banking system people don't have to contend with currency-changing ATMs that change dollars to euros, and when you feed euros into them by mistake they just shred your money in stead of spitting it back out.
That's not the user being gullible (or OK, maybe that too, but mainly), it's the system being moronic. Or perhaps rather, evil.
You can even retrospectively apply reasonable person type arguments no?
> You can even retrospectively apply reasonable person type arguments no?
Yeah. A significant part of a traditional contract revolves around defining the entities and behaviors you're actually talking about, and another part is about specifying requirements and boundaries for these entities and behaviors. However, it is entirely possible that during a conflict, the parties of the contract disagree about the meanings of the words on paper.
In such a case, you'd bring in a judge by bringing this to court, and a judge has the right to interpret the words and act in the spirit of the contract clauses, not just the words, and to deliberate about the feasibility of clauses. And that's a good thing, because this is a strong defense against scam and fraud.
Like, if something really strongly looks like a contract to buy a car, but technically doesn't say you buy the car, but also doesn't say you don't buy the car. If you get sued for not paying rent or stealing the car in such a case, you could argue you thought you owned it.
That's another, huge, topic.
Smart contracts are code and there is no fallback mechanism in case of mistakes.
They probably have to be way more complicated than non-smart contracts?
Well, there is, but it's hard to pull off -- you can get the entire network to hard-fork to reverse it, like in the DAO hack response.
https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/the-dao-the-hack-...
The equivalent in code is pre-existing libraries, and miles of them. But the law has highly developed ways of ridding itself of cruft and tech debt over time, in a way that lib dependencies really don't.
The key factor is: human judgment
Surely, that problem will just scale with time, adoption and law suits.
This is all such an unbelievable waste of intellectual resources to re-invent the wheel
Maybe a bit like enterprise software, just add another abstraction layer...
This kind of fuckup could not happen with regular banking and if you somehow did mess up you can almost always have your money recovered. There is no way to just black hole it never to be seen again.
If it bothers you, you could probably also go through some service that insures your transactions and gives you a degree of reversibility.
The classic is for a trade, and the receiver has to confirm they received the stuff before the money is released.
Afaik "traditional" companies like ebay also struggle with that kind of thing.
That part we kind of figured out, maybe it's ok, albeit super slow and power intensive, but let's put that aside for a while.
But is there a solid mathematical and cryptographical basis for everything else layered on top? I don't get that impression, it just looks like they're just plugging gaping holes because there's a gold rush to be continued!
If they're just rebuilding a crappier version of the global financial system, there's no point in the rest of us following them.
Of course you can burn your crypto and send it so some random contract. You can also take traditional money, go to the woods and burn it.
Could.
So far you've been using the present tense, "the [dumb] contract replaces the solicitor", or such.
Obviously it doesn't. Or could you tell me in which countries in the world you won't, at present, have to pay the government to register real estate ownership changes in its ledger just because you paid the seller in a crypto-"currency"?
It's not obvious at all that it could be replaced by crypto.
Just to say, it really doesn't make sense to judge "crypto" by the state of Ethereum. There are different philosophies, different approaches, different people.
Maybe they'll find solutions. Cool, let them put those solutions in practice in 2040 when all the bugs have been worked out.
It was never a solution in search of a problem.
In 1999 the tech wasn't there but everyone could see where it was going, like all investments, it was a matter of timing.
Crypto is still at the fundamental research phase and we don't even have consensus that it does more good than bad, yet.
And yes, I know about the supposed use for people in countries with unstable regimes but I'm not convinced at the moment. Plus that use case, being that of people generally having low disposable incomes (barring China) absolutely doesn't justify the market value of crypto at the moment.
That's your best argument against regular currencies? That they're being manipulated, too? :-)
That's exactly what Bitcoin miners do: They take pure thin air and convert it into noxious power plant fumes. Pure air is what the odiferous Bitcoin is conjured out of.
So all this complexity to get around regulations but you are going to run into the reasons this regulation came about at some scale.
"Gas" is one of those concepts where I have to relearn what it is every time I read about it but never can retain it for very long. (See also Big O notation.)
Say what you will about the primitiveness of Bitcoin and other early coins but at least they're quite a bit more comprehensible.
Isn‘t that just the fee for transfering cryptocoins from one wallet to another?
And you can decide on how much it is for your transfers, but if it‘s too low, your transfer will take a long time, up to „infinity/never“.
With 500k$ this smart contract will be able to run for a while.
if your gas doesnt cover the runtime of the contract, the process rolls back all transactions and eats the fee. so you have to overshoot and get refunded the difference.
always seemed like a nonstarter to me, that the computer cant tell me how much gas it needs (see: halting problem)
This was an early adopter that just got around to experimenting and didnt even try to keep up with how things work now.
Also at least with european banking, if you wringly send money to another account, it is also gone forever. A lot of scams regarding old people build up on this. We do not need to buy google play store vouchers like the americans tonget scammed.
Not true. The money is still legally yours if you can prove that it's a mistake or you were deceived, and can be recovered via the legal system if the recipient does not refund it voluntarily. Scammers just move the money away via other, less traceable channels before that can happen.
As you say, scammers move money quickly, and they do so to avoid the money being refunded.
Aren't European bank accounts tied to real world identities?
It's not though? The money is still legally yours and can be recovered via the legal system. Only if it is moved out of Europe into less well regulated areas it becomes a problem.
This happens in every case though. If I give you cash and you take it to god knows where it can't be recovered either. If I give you money and let you leave with it then there is only so much any system can do.
Or am I wrongly informed? Because that's the knowledge I have from central european laws.
> Wer durch die Leistung eines anderen oder in sonstiger Weise auf dessen Kosten etwas ohne rechtlichen Grund erlangt, ist ihm zur Herausgabe verpflichtet. Diese Verpflichtung besteht auch dann, wenn der rechtliche Grund später wegfällt oder der mit einer Leistung nach dem Inhalt des Rechtsgeschäfts bezweckte Erfolg nicht eintritt.
> A person who obtains something as a result of the performance of another person or otherwise at his expense without legal grounds for doing so is under a duty to make restitution to him. This duty also exists if the legal grounds later lapse or if the result intended to be achieved by those efforts in accordance with the contents of the legal transaction does not occur.
Basically there is law that says for every money send should be a cause, reason that justifies sending. If there is no such reason, reciever is entitled to send them back.
But at least someone still has that money; it hasn't been destroyed.
What happened here is the equivalent of sticking notes of the wrong currency into a currency-exchanging ATM, and it shredded them. The system itself was a destructor of value. That doesn't happen in the regular old cash-cards-and-banking system.
Heh, funny you say that, because there was the submission about the danger of the 30-year fixed mortgage, and how the typical borrower is in fact, making an effective bet on interest rate derivatives!
See this thread that quotes that part: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29774806