Last night I accidentally sent ETH to the GNT contract address (owing to the fact that the address was on my clipboard last and my old android phone that I have one of my wallets on did not copy the wallet address correctly), yet received this message in response from the Golem Team when I inquired about a potential solution: "Dear Benjamin, I am sorry, but there is no way we could help you. The GNT contract (which had been deployed on Ethereum blockchain before the crowdfunding) does not give use any technical possibilities to send GNT from the contract address." When I then replied that this could not be, I then received this second email: "Dear Benjamin, unfortunately, we are not able to access the tokens you sent as well. This is how the smart contract is structured. Technically no way to send tokens from this address."
Is this true? Are they telling the truth or just don't want to help?
Thank you all in advance!
Best Answer
One of the selling points of Ethereum is that it is trustless, and verifiable. All nodes hold a copy of the ledger, and communicate with one another to verify that a certain state is the current state.
Smart contracts allow a programmer to define exactly what happens when a particular function is called.
We can look at the Golem source code and see that for example the
transfermethod allows a user to send their token balance to another address if and only if they have an appropriate balance.You have sent that contract some Ether, but that contract can not send that Ether anywhere unless there is a function that does so. Contracts can not be edited after deployment because if they could be then no-one would be able to trust that a contract does (and will continue to do) what they expect.
Given this, I am afraid that your Ether is lost.