Busting my crypto bubble — what I learned from losing my honeymoon money

This blogpost is an account of how my honeymoon funds got lost (wording is important — “got lost” instead of “I lost them”) and how I got disillusioned by it. The conclusions below are my own, and I hope they can be useful for the whole community. If it prevents one other person to lose their money I am good. If it makes one crypto project to think about development practices and quality I am good.

What this post is not

Most importantly — this blogpost is not dig at Metamask, Ethereum or the cryptocurrencies in general. It is merely a real-world story that have given me a new perspective.

Another thing that this post is not — me being salty and looking reimbursement or compassion. Despite I’ve done nothing wrong, I’ve assumed the risk of crypto and I’ve paid the price for it.

The story

Setting the scene

The irony — 6 months ago I got married, to a person working in the bank system. Over the last 6 months I’ve been putting away portion of my salary and stuffing it in compound.

This served twofold purpose in my head:

1. It was going to be our honeymoon money
2. It was going to finally prove to her that crypto is safe, has great returns, and you do not need banks to store your value.

In hindsight, this backfired majorly. Also changed my mind.

The dreaded send button

With the recent upgrade from DAI to SAI, and the required update, I decided to move my money to argent as they will do the migration automatically for me.

I’ve migrated my browser Metamask plugin accounts to Metamask mobile (after we — at LimeChain — nearly lost 150000 tokens of a project, due to another issue involving hackers).

I withdrew my compound SAI to my metamask wallet succesfully. I decided to use my ENS name georgelime.argent.xyz — isn’t this how the future of crypto addresses looks? The interface showed that the ENS address was resolved correctly. I triple checked the address, all seemed fine.

Then I clicked the dreaded send button. https://etherscan.io/tx/0x4334bf847be81af374effac89f0d1108e4dbbab481634bc2b43d915753bde23c

Results and aftermath

Although the actual address was resolved successfully in the interface, the recipient address was not populated with it. I guess the devs, forgot to code it in the actual transaction code. All, my money went to 0x00000000000000000000005fc8559c9fbbb8fa3b . Cheers to whomever finds this private key one day.

My best guess is that the recipient address is the hex representation of “georgelime.argent.xyz”. Bye bye, $3k honeymoon money.

Conclusions — Bursting my bubble

If this can happen to me, what will happen with your mums savings

Just for reference, I’ve been in crypto for a long time. I am co-founder of one of the leading blockchain & DLT development providers in the world — LimeChain. I’ve seen a lot, I’ve done a lot. I’ve fought frontrunners, I’ve worked on meta transactions, I’ve built tools and developed smart contracts. If this can happen to me, imagine the chances of your parents not parting ways with their money eventually.

Decentralisation is nice until it bites you

I work with 25 blockchain professionals in our company. We swear by decentralisation and how it can help the world — until you end up actually “needing” this central point to revert a mistake that you’ve nothing to do with. I’ve realised that very few of us, the crypto people, actually realise the price we need to pay for decentralisation.

Slowly we all got hit by the realisation that decentralisation is all fun and games until it isn’t.

Most of my colleagues asked me if I’ve contracted metamask and asked for reimbursement…

We should take feedback to heart, ASAP

I actually submitted a bug report to Metamask immediately, a week went by in radio silence. It wasn’t until a recent tweet of mine got seen by an acquaintance of mine working with Metamask, that I got contacted (Thank you James Moreau for that!).

We are all constantly moaning that we have no users, and that we need more adoption and feedback. Yet here is a bug, that quite possibly might result in a lot of people, losing a lot more money, and the radio stays silent.

I cant help but wonder where we are going with this crypto thing, if the team behind the defacto “interface of crypto” (99% of ppl end up with MM), wont respond to money losing bug. I hope and trust that my case has been the odd one that got lost in the shuffle :)

We need to take (blockchain) development professionally

Last but not least, this situation got me thinking about the state of development professionalism we have in our little bubble these days. I know this will ruffle some feathers, but I feel someone needs to say it.

We are constantly bragging how smart we are, with Vitalik, Gavin and Vlad, at the top, yet stop and think about the bug that costed my honeymoon.

As a professional developer, the first two things you learn, when it comes to quality of your software product, is that you must have peer reviews and unit tests.

I cant imagine how the problematic code ended up in production, if it has went successfully through a peer review — it is a mistake quite easy to catch.

But hey, to err is humane, the peer reviewer might have missed it. This is why we have unit tests to help us stop these honest mistakes right? The most simplistic unit test would have caught this bug. Yet it did not.

We need to be more professional and act more professionally. We need to employ the processes we know are working in the software development. We need teams that care about security and software quality — I swear by this and it can be seen in all our work. Professional developers, using professional processes build professional software — anything less should not do.

What is next?

I guess I will never win the argument for crypto against banks in my family. As an interesting turn of events, my wife has saved up some money for honeymoon too — in a bank.

This does not change my belief in the blockchain technology or even the cryptocurrencies. Yes, I am hurting and will take some time until I buy my next DAI, but I know I will. I do hope that you will be doing your software due diligence and trust the professionals, the next time you use a crypto app, or decide to start your own crypto project.

Last, but not least — crypto is very early stage. We need to learn much more and innovate much more for it to be useful for the masses. Lets use this experience as an opportunity to learn some more, and hopefully change something for the better. I’d love to hear, how we can save the next George :)

Photo credit — VisualHunt.com