Error message inaccurate when querying future block.

[danfinlay]

System information

Geth version: 1.5.5
OS & Version: Linux (Infura)
Commit hash : Not Sure

Expected behaviour

When querying items like eth_getBalance or eth_getTransactionCount with a block number in the future, I would expect either the latest state, or an error.

Actual behaviour

the returned value seems mal-formed:
{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1482348034196178,"result":"\u003cnil\u003e"}

Steps to reproduce the behaviour

curl 'http://127.0.0.1:8545' -H 'Origin: http://localhost:7357' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.95 Safari/537.36' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -H 'Accept: application/json' -H 'Referer: http://localhost:7357/development/test.html' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' --data-binary '{"id":14834196178,"jsonrpc":"2.0","params":["0xf414ca28e61abc7ad7d9b09a2c10de6573cc41ee","0x990799"],"method":"eth_getBalance"}' —compressed

Backtrace

I'm not sure what this means, I was using a remote node (Infura), I don't have console output for this command.

Other Notes

Parity also seems to be behaving oddly for this edge case, might be a nice opportunity to coordinate a consistent behavior for it.

Originally discovered through MetaMask.

[shbli]

Able to reproduce it here, looking into it ...

[stale]

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