Making it easy to build contracts that will accept resources and then never do anything with them, destroying the value, is a design mistake.
This is something the developer of the contract should explicitly opt into. As others pointed out, if everything a contract did was via explicit methods, rather than transfers, this type of defect would never have been created.
And this mentality is what will block wider adoption of crypto. Calling people dumb for not understanding a non-intuitive system (after there's so much prior, "return to sender" art in the world) will not get them to use crypto.
Sure, I have no desire for cryptocurrency to get a wider adoption, I have no skin in the game, I'm just looking at the facts. I don't care if the space burns up or saves the world, for me is the same.
This is not the case of a non-intuitive system screwing the user. This is the user purposefully avoiding using the intuitive systems setup for them, and interacting with something directly even though no one does that unless you're a developer. This person has half a million dollars worth of X, while not understanding X.
> (after there's so much prior, "return to sender" art in the world)
That's awesome that you have come up with a solution for this, while the ecosystem hasn't been able to. Could you share your solution?
It's a hard problem to solve in a system that has to A) be decentralized, B) work when less than half the network is trying to screw you and C) prevent double-spending
"return to sender" sounds easy to implement in a centralized system, but it's not that simple for a decentralized one. At least not until you release your solution.
> This is the user purposefully avoiding using the intuitive systems setup for them, and interacting with something directly even though no one does that unless you're a developer.
Of course using the intuitive systems setup for the
means that one has to trust some random people or companies, instead of going directly to the blockchain. What happened to trustless?
"Trustless" is referring to the consensus in the protocols, not to the entire ecosystem. This is a ecosystem built by and for humans, of course there will be trust involved.
You are intentionally misrepresenting the parent comment. The point is not that nobody should be able to transfer from one address to another, and pretending otherwise is pretty dishonest.
But then please share with me what the argument is? The user made a transfer that shouldn't have been done in the first place, and somehow people are saying that the protocol should have safe-guards against doing transfers to the wrong address, but how is the protocol supposed to know what address is right/wrong? There is literally no distinction between them, so therefore you need to allow any transfer, or no transfer.
So I guess, when it comes down to the wire, what wins out, the needs of real users, or the documented description of a protocol?
The fact that said protocol is incapable of addressing real needs is a failure state, and historically this has been addressed by building better tooling on top of the protocol, or replacing it wholesale.
> The user made a transfer that shouldn't have been done in the first place, and somehow people are saying that the protocol should have safe-guards against doing transfers to the wrong address, but how is the protocol supposed to know what address is right/wrong?
Sure, the user sent stuff to the wrong address... Or did he? Seems, rather, that he sent the wrong kind of stuff. Had he sent, whateveritwas, WETF in stead of WETH or vice versa, then it would have gone right.
So then it seems the receiving thingamajig was at least as much at fault: It accepted (and just swallowed) a kind of stuff it shouldn't receive. It's like, say, a one-way currency-changing ATM that takes dollars and returns euros. If you feed in euros by mistake, it fucking obviously should just spit them back out (and preferably display or print an error message, "Wrong currency: Gimme dollars to get euros.") You're saying just swallowing your euros would be a "valid" behaviour for that machine.
That's so obviously bullshit that the only remaining mystery here is whether you're actively trying to defend what you know is indefensible, or actually so deluded that you've somehow convinced yourself this bullshit is true. Well, no, not the only one: The other mystery is, which is worse?
>how is the protocol supposed to know what address is right/wrong?
It's the "right" address for certain transactions--like turning ETH into WETH--but the "wrong" address for other transactions, which makes the whole thing a garbage design. You can say "that's just the way Ethereum/crypto/smart contracts work" all day, but it doesn't matter.
Most people don't care why the design is bad, they just care that it is bad, and that there are better theoretical (or real) alternatives to this tech.
Your analogies make sense to me. Sounds a lot like running a system on Linux. Or maybe assembly is a better metaphor. I like the analogy about avoiding all the safety mechanisms on an electric line and jamming your hand in there...the grid can't tell the difference.
The arguments here are odd. The blockchain isn't built to handle this kind of operation by a non-expert user. Yes, mistakes are expensive. Is that okay? In the same way that a nuclear power plant isn't designed for a rando to go in and operate it.
Yes, raw blockchain stuff is hard and non-experts should not interact directly.
The key question is, is the payoff worth building an entire system around? For nuclear power, yes, because it provides electricity for people to just plug into. For blockchain, maybe, maybe not.
> The blockchain isn't built to handle this kind of operation by a non-expert user.
But the blockchain in general and smart contracts especially are pretty expressly supposed to be, that is, central to trustlessness is not requiring some elite priesthood as an intermediary (either personally or as trusted purveyors of overlay systems) between end users and the authoritative system.
Sticking your dick into a socket results in transfer of electrons from one object to another, thats the entire point of the electric grid! Clearly it's designers had no need to design circuit breakers, ground fault circuit interrupters, etc.
Listen, in this case, there already is circuit breakers, ground fault circuit interrupters and more to prevent problems to happen in the first place. The wallet is the first guard against this, the UIs the various services provide is another, and so on.
But when the user bypasses those and interact directly with the chain, which is not recommended for people who don't know what they are doing, problems can happen.
The same as if someone bypasses all those checks you wrote about, and then complains that they got a ton of electricity zapped into them. Why doesn't the grid just know that it was a human and not something else and stopped sending electricity?!
This transfer was a transfer from one address to another. No one has ever wanted to do that? It's the entire point of cryptocurrencies!