If you're gonna deal directly with the forex industry without any safe-guards there will definitely be a bunch of jargon around, have you ever dealt with the insides of forex trading before?

In general, giving someone money does not require intimate knowledge of what's happening behind the scenes, that's true. But the submission is not about a normal transfer, the user is explicitly avoiding the safe-guards in place, and got burned by it. It's no surprise really.

> have you ever dealt with the insides of forex trading before?

Why, is there a way to send currency directly and irrecoverably into a paper shredder on the inside?

The idea behind 'smart' contracts is to have immutable and decentralized pieces of code on the blockchain to execute transactions, eg. to swap ETH for NFTs or ETH to WETH like in the OP. They have addresses because they can keep a balance, but because they are supposed to be dencentralized no one can move that balance. If it did have a transfer or withdraw function people would have to trust the creator not to suddenly scam everyone.

But yeah the ability to send the directly to the address is stupid. There are no real world and crypto world use cases do it. I think the most glaring thing is that person has 500k in ETH but no idea how smart contract work or how to use the functions...

> to execute transactions, eg. to swap ETH for NFTs or ETH to WETH like in the OP.

It could apparently only swap from one kind of crypto-"currency" to other stuff.

> But yeah the ability to send the directly to the address is stupid.

Isn't the problem raher the ability to send the wrong "currency" to the address?

If it can only change from one kind to others, then the correct behaviour is obviously to accept only that kind, and reject any others. This is basically an online version of a physical currency-changing ATM, where you feed in dollars to get euros (or other currencies?) in stead. If you feed in euros or pounds or yen by mistake, the ATM should obviously spit it back out. This online version just swallowed the wrong currency. You don't have to know how ATMs actually work internally in order to determine that this is invalid behaviour not only on the user's part, but definitely on the ATM's too. If the ATM can only change from dollars to other currencies, then it should only accept dollars.

If you real with trading, options and swaps without understanding them - yes, very much so

Well no, you can use options and swaps to accidentally "gift" your money to more proficient traders or to market-making institutions or just pay it away in fees, but in all those cases you're giving the money to someone, not shredding it.

Do you actually understand what happened in this case?

No one sent any currencies into a "shredder", so not sure why you're asking this question?

an immutable black hole might as well be a shredder. the OP in the reddit did precisely that. that money is GONE. locked away forever. it has not been transferred to anyone else.

Indeed, an "immutable black hole" could be described as a shredder, agree. But that's not what that address is. The semi-official "black hole" address for Ethereum is 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000000000000000000000000...), currently has $29,461,295.02 worth of ETH in it. Any other (valid) address is just another address on the network.

"It's not a black hole, because black holes are collapsed stars, which is clearly not what we're talking about."

This is basically the style of argumentation being used here. Frequent equivocation over the terms "valid" and "black hole" to avoid addressing anyone's actual point.

Why do you see a difference between colloquial usage of ‘black hole’ and ‘valid address from which tokens cannot be retrieved’?

This kind of argument came to mind when I first read the thread, but then I thought... isn't the whole point of crypto to be decentralized? To avoid these kinds of concentrated power structures?

Also, chemistry sets come with a lot of graphic warnings.

Do we need a "hot coffee is hot" warning label on every crypto transaction?

And yes I'm aware the lady in the case suffered and it's terrible. I'm just being facetious

Oh come on. This is clearly a terrible system design choice and should have never been codified.

If it is ever going to solve a fraction of the societal ills promised, yeah sounds like it will need that warning.

I've been paying attention to this whole thing for a few years, and I still can't tell how I could send coins to a friend if I had them.