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by capableweb 1606 days ago
Hm, in order to clear up some (seemingly) confusion about how things work, let me offer you this explanation:

The user in the submission did not send funds to a invalid address. The address is valid, as otherwise funds wouldn't be able to be sent to it (the wallet would not allow you, nor the protocol, nor the miner/validators). The address happens to belong to a contract, that can also hold funds, similarly to accounts.

Now, every address/account/contract has a private-key behind it, that allows the owner of the private-key to transfer out of the address/account/contract, but it's impossible to know if the owner actually still has the private-key.

Similarly to how you can't know if john@example.com actually has access to his email account (maybe he forgot his password?), you can't know if an address actually has the possibility of moving the funds out of the address, as the private-key can have been thrown/forgotten/lost.

1 comments

I’ve made myself abundantly clear that WETH or whatever smart contract shouldn’t blackhole money by default when there’s no handler code, just like mailserver software shouldn’t blackhole emails by default. This is not a case of John making a mistake of forgetting their password, it’s ridiculous fallback behavior with unconsidered edge cases (or maybe considered but intentionally unhandled due to stupidly expensive compute). The design is atrocious and apparently it’s the default for all smart contracts.

The stakes are a little bit higher when you’re sending money instead of emails.