How I Lost $1,000,000 Clicking The Wrong Button

I backed the ConstitutionDAO for fun & learned a lesson about wallets & Juicebox

A few weeks ago I chipped into the ConsitutionDAO—a hilarious attempt to try and buy one of the only copies of the United States’ founding documents. You can read about it in Forbes here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2021/12/01/crypto-tokens-people-constitution-dao-ether-redeem-refund/

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I put in some ETH to help my friends on their mission and thoroughly enjoyed watching the bidding process. Then, after we failed, the $PEOPLE token mooned inexplicably.

In my excitement, I went to my phone to get hold of my $PEOPLE from the DAO. It was built with a service called Juicebox.money. I did not understand the difference between REDEEM and CLAIM. I clicked the wrong one 🙈 You can watch me do it here:

https://www.tiktok.com/@ricburton/video/7043838876061814062

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What did I learn?

Whenever I make a huge mistake, I try to reflect on what I could have done differently and what I will try to change about myself moving forward. Here is my review:

• Double check every single smart contract function before doing anything

• Work on wallet software that can do this automatically

• Contact the designers of every dapp to talk to them about this

• Think carefully about why Juicebox’s designers failed me

• Never do 100% of a transaction in one go—break it up

• If I can make a mistake this bad, what about new folks to Ethereum?

How can we fix this? SafeSend in Safari Wallet

The Safari Wallet community has already started thinking about how we can fix this. We have come up with a feature called SafeSend. It will start with basic rules:

• Sending 50%+ of your wallet’s value? Slow it down.

• Sending money to a smart contract which will lock it? Huge warning signs.

• Calling a smart contract function that will result in huge losses? Mega warning.

• Sending to an address you have never sent to before? Let the customer know.

It will then get much more intelligent in the future. We will start to score addresses based on lots of factors and bring that information to the customer’s attention.

Want to help us? Check out the project on Github:

https://github.com/safari-wallet

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