MetaMask returning bad value for solidity account.balance

[danfinlay]

Reported by a user, referred to us by the Solidity team here:
ethereum/solidity#2325

Seems we're returning a strange result for account.balance, like msg.sender.balance.

[madmartian5]

Any update on this?

[danfinlay]

No, sorry, this hasn't received any attention at all.

I’ve taken the steps to reproduce, here is what I did, and what I found:

Solidity

pragma solidity ^0.4.11;

contract Test {
function balanceOfEther(address user) public constant returns (uint256) { return user.balance; } 
}

Deployed to Ropsten at 0x64488483c613753cb33ef160cbb3ed8c7e866c08

For account 0xc5b8dbac4c1d3f152cdeb400e2313f309c410acb

When balance is fetched like this:

curl 'https://api.infura.io/v1/jsonrpc/ropsten/eth_getBalance?params=%5B%220xc5b8dbac4c1d3f152cdeb400e2313f309c410acb%22%2C%22latest%22%5D' -H 'pragma: no-cache' -H 'accept-encoding: gzip, deflate, br' -H 'accept-language: en,fr;q=0.9,en-US;q=0.8,es;q=0.7' -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.139 Safari/537.36' -H 'accept: */*' -H 'cache-control: no-cache' -H 'authority: api.infura.io' --compressed

it returns:

{“jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"result":"0x3a5511a089c2f180”}

We call to infura:

curl 'https://api.infura.io/v1/jsonrpc/ropsten' -H 'pragma: no-cache' -H 'origin: null' -H 'accept-encoding: gzip, deflate, br' -H 'accept-language: en,fr;q=0.9,en-US;q=0.8,es;q=0.7' -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.139 Safari/537.36' -H 'content-type: application/json' -H 'accept: application/json' -H 'cache-control: no-cache' -H 'authority: api.infura.io' --data-binary '{"id":570283474,"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"eth_call","params":[{"from":"0xc5b8dbac4c1d3f152cdeb400e2313f309c410acb","to":"0x64488483c613753cb33ef160cbb3ed8c7e866c08","value":"0x0","data":"0x21114904000000000000000000000000c5b8dbac4c1d3f152cdeb400e2313f309c410acb","gas":"0x2dc6c0"},"latest"]}' --compressed

It returned:

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":570283474,"result":"0xfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffdeb17cb73b0ffff"}

Interpreted by remix as:

0: uint256: 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457434007913129639935

Which is indeed the base 10 representation of the Infura result.

One user in the remix issue reported:

about 50% of the time I get the correct result, other times I get 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039455084007913129639935. Perhaps a geth/MetaMask issue - never seen with JavascriptVM.



This is the same number we got for this result. I tried many more times, and never was able to get a correct result from Infura here. Reaching out to Infura to see what they think, I wonder if this is a Geth bug.

[Gudahtt]

This appears to have been fixed in ethereum/go-ethereum#16999

I haven't confirmed this has been fixed, but I'll close it for now anyway since it doesn't seem to be a problem with MetaMask itself.