Who can access private state variables?

Question

I was reading solidity Docs and everything made sense until I got to this:

What are external observers? Is it clients listening for events or is it anyone who has access to web3 api?

For example, who can access and modify uint private x = 255; except the contract it's in?

In other words, how can one get the value stored in a private state variable?

Related: http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/6547/solidity-functions-visibility — eth, Nov 20 '16 at 01:38

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 01 '16 at 08:46

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External observers are anyone who access to a block explorer, or is otherwise able to get blocks from the network and parse the data on the blockchain.

Note that they can only access data in your contract, they are not able to modify it.

So we can all find out the value of your uint private x. If I wrote a contract, the contract wouldn't directly be able to see what x was, because x would be a private variable in a different contract. But if my contract trusted me I could look up x myself and send it to my contract as a parameter...

answered Aug 01 '16 at 08:46

Edmund Edgar

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thank you, I get it now. However, I just looked up the contract account of Eth foundation on etherchain.org and didn't find any information on its state variables. https://etherchain.org/account/0xde0b295669a9fd93d5f28d9ec85e40f4cb697bae#txsent. – manidos Aug 01 '16 at 08:59
The same on etherscan.io... – manidos Aug 01 '16 at 09:06
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Try https://live.ether.camp/ – Edmund Edgar Aug 01 '16 at 09:14
just to be clear, there's absolutely no way to call a private function from outside the contract it resides in? – manidos Aug 03 '16 at 06:18
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Correct. A private function can only be called by the contract that declares it. – Edmund Edgar Aug 03 '16 at 06:35

Who can access private state variables?

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