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.
