Mastering Blockchain Programming with Solidity

Destroying contracts using the selfdestruct function

selfdestruct(address recipient) is a globally available function. This is used to destroy an already deployed contract instance. Once the contract is destroyed on blockchain, all of its storage is released from blockchain. 

The address argument of the function takes the recipient's address. If any ether balance is present in the contract, all of the ether balance will be sent to the recipient address.

As the selfdestruct function call releases storage from the blockchain, there are some gas refunds, which reduces the gas consumption and eventually leads to lower transaction fees.

An example of the selfdestruct function call is shown in the following code:

  function kill() public { require(msg.sender ...