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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

> You are now the 265th person to do this but you contributed 45% of all the WETH in the contract.

I feel like this should be the takeaway. Instead of blaming users there should be some system that allows patches, updates and new features to be published to these smart contracts. It just seems silly that any programmer would think it’s a good idea to publish some code you can’t patch and horrifying to let that code scale to this size without being able to correct any of your original assumptions.

There is such a thing as a "proxy" contract. The contract can delegate to another "delegate" contract that actually performs the functions you want. The proxy contract also has a function that allows the owner to change the address of the delegate contract. If you tell you users to interact with the proxy contract then they will always interact with the latest version of the delegate contract.

Some ERC20 tokens implement this but I believe many do not.

https://docs.openzeppelin.com/contracts/3.x/api/proxy

How is the proxy contract tested - wouldn't you need to create a proxy-to-the-proxy contract just in case there is a bug and need to point it to the fixed version?

There are a couple design patterns for this

265 people made a mistake which deleted their money. How is crypto still so broken at a fundamental level after over a decade of work.

265 people made a mistake in this particular way deleting their money. Given the amount of cryptobank scams and hacks, lost wallets etc I would not dare have any significant value in cryptos.

Like the people that have made them self a fortune on crypto need to understand that it is psychology a different thing to put fresh money into the system from just extracting profit made from almost nothing.

I've lost bills before, forgot to check change, that was all on me.

At least in that case someone actually got the money. In this case there was a valid transaction to a valid address that no one owns and no one can access.

Not if the money were say burned but at any rate, someone 'gets' them here, too - all holders' get the value of their eth proportionally increased because of the decreased amount of eth in circulation.

The incentive of any crypto/web3 app is short-term greed and not building a trustworthy system.

Proof here on the blockchain: https://etherscan.io/token/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead90...

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