The observer could read headers, events, extrinsics, metadata and difficulty,
and not a single pallet storage item. Answering "which address is this chain's
treasury" meant going outside it and hand-deriving twox128 prefixes, which is a
gap in the tool rather than an answer.
The treasury is the case that shows why. `set_treasury_account` reads *never* on
the call index and `TreasuryAccountUpdated` reads *never* on the event index —
both true, because the address was set at genesis, so no extrinsic ever carried
it and no event ever announced it. It exists only in state. It is
qzjsuLN7Nhu4bjvmUbjSTr2ZTeZ7oRxXpQP9fdv6PcHUCRrVR, and it has never been funded.
`Runtime::storage_key` builds a key entirely from the runtime's own description
— the pallet's storage prefix, the item name, and each key's declared hasher —
because a wrong hasher yields a key that reads as *absent* rather than as an
error, and nothing would catch it. Its test pins two keys against ones read off
the live chain by hand. Keys are SCALE-encoded against the type the entry
declares, so a map on an account, a u32 or a tuple all work without this knowing
which it is.
Absent is not zero, and only the modifier knows which: an `optional` entry
holding nothing means nothing, a `default` entry means the runtime's default,
and the state page marks the latter rather than passing it off as something the
chain wrote. `read_balance` deliberately does not apply the default —
`AccountInfo` zeroes, Substrate reaps empty accounts, and falling back would
turn "does not exist" into "holds nothing", which is the treasury's exact case.
/:chain/state lists all 40 keyless entries decoded, and an account page now
carries a real balance beside the flows it already summed. Those are different
numbers: rewards say what an account was paid, a balance says what it has, and
they differ by every transfer out.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jp6a8EDar9ueEhAxzep4V5
rob thijssen
6b0e02e059
