Contraction creation with colliding addresses

[axic]

I am looking for the definitive answer to what happens in the very unlikely, but still possible, scenario when a newly created contract address would clash with an existing (contract) address.

If I understand the YP properly, in Chapter 7 it describes it as:

• do as if it were a new contract (i.e. rewrite the whole state)
• with one exception: keep the account balance

Is that correct? Wouldn't it make more sense having it as a clear error condition?

[nmushegian]

This is one of several soft assumptions based on probabilistic arguments that could be made protocol-level assumptions. For example, I'd like extra protection against discovering address 0's private key. I acknowledge it seems silly but you can imagine a world where it was silly not to have sanity checks on the crypto ops enforced by protocol.

[kumavis]

relevant: the ethereum org's multisig wallet worked by funding the contract's address in the genesis block and then later publishing the contract after the thawing

[axic]

Thank you @kumavis that probably is the reason for this behaviour.

That doesn't necessarily means it makes sense for the future. Are we expecting any other pre-funded contracts to be revealed?

On the other hand it is an interesting feature.

[axic]

Having spent a bit of time reconsidering this, my suggestion is to keep the current way of "overwriting" unless the code storage is set (i.e. a contract is deployed).

That enables pre-funded contracts, but disables subsequent overwrites once the contract has been deployed.

[subtly]

Collisions simply aren't resolvable.

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