Equation (68) tells us we must add the price of the used gas to the coinbase account when transitioning from the provisional to the prefinal state, but AFAICT nowhere requires that the coinbase account pre-exist nor indicates what should be done if it does not exist.
I think that the intended behavior is to add a new account with the incoming ether, but it's also plausible that specifying a nonexistent coinbase would raise some kind of error or that the operation would be skipped and the incoming ether simply lost.
Sorry if I'm missing something!
Equation (68) tells us we must add the price of the used gas to the coinbase account when transitioning from the provisional to the prefinal state, but AFAICT nowhere requires that the coinbase account pre-exist nor indicates what should be done if it does not exist.
I think that the intended behavior is to add a new account with the incoming ether, but it's also plausible that specifying a nonexistent coinbase would raise some kind of error or that the operation would be skipped and the incoming ether simply lost.