A Crypto User Sent $50k to a Smart Contract. It's Gone Forever

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25443212" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25443212</a>

&quot; Some activities superficially familiar to you are merely stupid and should be avoided for your safety, [..] These include: giving your bank account details to the son of the Nigerian Minister of Finance; buying title to bridges [..] and entering into financial contracts with entities running Economics 2.0 or higher. &quot;<p>- Accelerando by Charles Stross

It&#x27;s not 50k (more like $50), but I have a similar story with Stellar.<p>I was one of the (thousands of?) people who Keybase&#x2F;Stellar&#x2F;mysterious parties decided to gift some of their tokens to. I tried to transfer them to a provider with my bank information, and immediately flushed them into &#x2F;dev&#x2F;null because I didn&#x27;t understand the <i>separate</i> sequences of numbers that I was supposed to provide.<p>I wasn&#x27;t exactly upset, but it really solidified my opinion of the entire space: as an end user, my <i>single greatest interest</i> is the fidelity of the transactions that I take part in. Tack onto that the constant whirlwind of technical compromises that lack legal recourse, and my feelings of confidence approach zero.

From the bottom:<p>&gt; Still, user mistakes keep occurring with unenviable regularity. In late October, someone sent 28,050 AAVE tokens—worth around $1.1 million at the time—to the wrong address, which resulted in the irreversible loss of their funds. It’s a scary world out there.<p>Incredible.

There is a portion of my brain that might never be able to comprehend digital currency with real money. It’s possible I’m not incapable of understanding it.<p>All I’ve ever heard are exchanges that are so grossly incompetent that I would never even think about engaging with. Months of waiting for verification that never happens. Waiting for transfers that never happen.<p>Uploading passports and drivers licenses to an exchange, and bank account information, to only think that 6 months from now there will be a breach and all my information is downloaded by criminals. It’s a full stop to not even consider proceeding.<p>I would love to know how someone can convert Bitcoin or other digital currency to millions of USD that are capable of hitting a bank account, that can be spent at the local grocery store.<p>I watched as Bitcoin became a thing and never even considered touching it because I didn’t even remotely wanted to be associated with criminals using it for drugs and other illegal stuff.<p>Anyways, digital currency is just so bizarre to me.

Why don&#x27;t these tech support the oldest trick every financial companies have been doing?<p>They send a cent and see if the recipient received it or not. If the money went through and is secured, then send the rest. Simply by doing this, you could avoid almost all incidents like these.

I&#x27;m never trusting software for two things:<p>1. Voting<p>2. Irreversible transactions

I like that one of the recommended solutions is to use named addresses instead of wallet hashes.<p>DNS and domains instead of IP addresses

A donation to everyone, deflation

&quot;welp, fck this, I&#x27;m not doing crypto anytime soon&quot; - most people who are technically competent but not experts, including myself