Jesus you ' re dumb <| sep |> That ' s not actually the case OOG still has to update the sender and miner accounts to account for gas used , and for the increase in the sender ' s nonce . Yes , I know I meant accounts state touched by executed opcodes , not the internal accounting related to gas expenditure . The Ethereum consensus test suite has many tests that test out of gas behaviour . It didn ' t have a test that tests this particular edge case , which was introduced by the recent HF previously , accounts could not be deleted . I ' ll put my money where my mouth is and help you rewrite more general tests that don ' t depend on specific featuresbehaviour not existing , then . If only Geth existed , or Parity had the same bug , the network would operate fine in this case the bug is such that either behaviour is allowable , as long as all clients behave identically . See my other reply this is a dangerous line of thinking , the Eth nodes are not the only thing in the ecosystem that assumes behaviour . For this bug it ' s probably mostly benign as it would lead some gas accounting being off , but in the future it could lead to services making assumptions that don ' t agree with the faulty node state .