Ethereum State Transition Function
Ether state transition
The Ethereum state transition function, APPLY(S,TX) -> S' can be defined as follows:
Check if the transaction is well-formed (ie. has the right number of values), the signature is valid, and the nonce matches the nonce in the sender's account. If not, return an error.
Calculate the transaction fee as STARTGAS * GASPRICE, and determine the sending address from the signature. Subtract the fee from the sender's account balance and increment the sender's nonce. If there is not enough balance to spend, return an error.
Initialize GAS = STARTGAS, and take off a certain quantity of gas per byte to pay for the bytes in the transaction.
Transfer the transaction value from the sender's account to the receiving account. If the receiving account does not yet exist, create it. If the receiving account is a contract, run the contract's code either to completion or until the execution runs out of gas.
If the value transfer failed because the sender did not have enough money, or the code execution ran out of gas, revert all state changes except the payment of the fees, and add the fees to the miner's account.
Otherwise, refund the fees for all remaining gas to the sender, and send the fees paid for gas consumed to the miner.
For example, suppose that the contract's code is:
if !self.storage[calldataload(0)]:
self.storage[calldataload(0)] = calldataload(32)
Note that in reality the contract code is written in the low-level EVM code; this example is written in Serpent, one of our high-level languages, for clarity, and can be compiled down to EVM code. Suppose that the contract's storage starts off empty, and a transaction is sent with 10 ether value, 2000 gas, 0.001 ether gasprice, and 64 bytes of data, with bytes 0-31 representing the number 2 and bytes 32-63 representing the string CHARLIE.fn. 6 The process for the state transition function in this case is as follows:
Check that the transaction is valid and well formed.
Check that the transaction sender has at least 2000 * 0.001 = 2 ether. If it is, then subtract 2 ether from the sender's account.
Initialize gas = 2000; assuming the transaction is 170 bytes long and the byte-fee is 5, subtract 850 so that there is 1150 gas left.
Subtract 10 more ether from the sender's account, and add it to the contract's account.
Run the code. In this case, this is simple: it checks if the contract's storage at index 2 is used, notices that it is not, and so it sets the storage at index 2 to the value CHARLIE. Suppose this takes 187 gas, so the remaining amount of gas is 1150 - 187 = 963
Add 963 * 0.001 = 0.963 ether back to the sender's account, and return the resulting state.
If there was no contract at the receiving end of the transaction, then the total transaction fee would simply be equal to the provided GASPRICE multiplied by the length of the transaction in bytes, and the data sent alongside the transaction would be irrelevant.
Note that messages work equivalently to transactions in terms of reverts: if a message execution runs out of gas, then that message's execution, and all other executions triggered by that execution, revert, but parent executions do not need to revert. This means that it is "safe" for a contract to call another contract, as if A calls B with G gas then A's execution is guaranteed to lose at most G gas. Finally, note that there is an opcode, CREATE, that creates a contract; its execution mechanics are generally similar to CALL, with the exception that the output of the execution determines the code of a newly created contract.
Code Execution
The code in Ethereum contracts is written in a low-level, stack-based bytecode language, referred to as "Ethereum virtual machine code" or "EVM code". The code consists of a series of bytes, where each byte represents an operation. In general, code execution is an infinite loop that consists of repeatedly carrying out the operation at the current program counter (which begins at zero) and then incrementing the program counter by one, until the end of the code is reached or an error or STOP or RETURN instruction is detected. The operations have access to three types of space in which to store data:
The stack, a last-in-first-out container to which values can be pushed and popped
Memory, an infinitely expandable byte array
The contract's long-term storage, a key/value store. Unlike stack and memory, which reset after computation ends, storage persists for the long term.
The code can also access the value, sender and data of the incoming message, as well as block header data, and the code can also return a byte array of data as an output.
The formal execution model of EVM code is surprisingly simple. While the Ethereum virtual machine is running, its full computational state can be defined by the tuple (block_state, transaction, message, code, memory, stack, pc, gas), where block_state is the global state containing all accounts and includes balances and storage. At the start of every round of execution, the current instruction is found by taking the pc-th byte of code (or 0 if pc >= len(code)), and each instruction has its own definition in terms of how it affects the tuple. For example, ADD pops two items off the stack and pushes their sum, reduces gas by 1 and increments pc by 1, and SSTORE pops the top two items off the stack and inserts the second item into the contract's storage at the index specified by the first item. Although there are many ways to optimize Ethereum virtual machine execution via just-in-time compilation, a basic implementation of Ethereum can be done in a few hundred lines of code.
Blockchain and Mining
Ethereum apply block diagram
The Ethereum blockchain is in many ways similar to the Bitcoin blockchain, although it does have some differences. The main difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin with regard to the blockchain architecture is that, unlike Bitcoin(which only contains a copy of the transaction list), Ethereum blocks contain a copy of both the transaction list and the most recent state. Aside from that, two other values, the block number and the difficulty, are also stored in the block. The basic block validation algorithm in Ethereum is as follows:
Check if the previous block referenced exists and is valid.
Check that the timestamp of the block is greater than that of the referenced previous block and less than 15 minutes into the future
Check that the block number, difficulty, transaction root, uncle root and gas limit (various low-level Ethereum-specific concepts) are valid.
Check that the proof of work on the block is valid.
Let S be the state at the end of the previous block.
Let TX be the block's transaction list, with n transactions. For all i in 0...n-1, set S = APPLY(S,TX). If any application returns an error, or if the total gas consumed in the block up until this point exceeds the GASLIMIT, return an error.
Let S_FINAL be S, but adding the block reward paid to the miner.
Check if the Merkle tree root of the state S_FINAL is equal to the final state root provided in the block header. If it is, the block is valid; otherwise, it is not valid.
The approach may seem highly inefficient at first glance, because it needs to store the entire state with each block, but in reality efficiency should be comparable to that of Bitcoin. The reason is that the state is stored in the tree structure, and after every block only a small part of the tree needs to be changed. Thus, in general, between two adjacent blocks the vast majority of the tree should be the same, and therefore the data can be stored once and referenced twice using pointers (ie. hashes of subtrees). A special kind of tree known as a "Patricia tree" is used to accomplish this, including a modification to the Merkle tree concept that allows for nodes to be inserted and deleted, and not just changed, efficiently. Additionally, because all of the state information is part of the last block, there is no need to store the entire blockchain history - a strategy which, if it could be applied to Bitcoin, can be calculated to provide 5-20x savings in space.
A commonly asked question is "where" contract code is executed, in terms of physical hardware. This has a simple answer: the process of executing contract code is part of the definition of the state transition function, which is part of the block validation algorithm, so if a transaction is added into block B the code execution spawned by that transaction will be executed by all nodes, now and in the future, that download and validate block B.
Applications
In general, there are three types of applications on top of Ethereum. The first category is financial applications, providing users with more powerful ways of managing and entering into contracts using their money. This includes sub-currencies, financial derivatives, hedging contracts, savings wallets, wills, and ultimately even some classes of full-scale employment contracts. The second category is semi-financial applications, where money is involved but there is also a heavy non-monetary side to what is being done; a perfect example is self-enforcing bounties for solutions to computational problems. Finally, there are applications such as online voting and decentralized governance that are not financial at all.
Token Systems
On-blockchain token systems have many applications ranging from sub-currencies representing assets such as USD or gold to company stocks, individual tokens representing smart property, secure unforgeable coupons, and even token systems with no ties to conventional value at all, used as point systems for incentivization. Token systems are surprisingly easy to implement in Ethereum. The key point to understand is that a currency, or token system, fundamentally is a database with one operation: subtract X units from A and give X units to B, with the provision that (1) A had at least X units before the transaction and (2) the transaction is approved by A. All that it takes to implement a token system is to implement this logic into a contract.
The basic code for implementing a token system in Serpent looks as follows:
def send(to, value):
if self.storage[msg.sender] >= value:
self.storage[msg.sender] = self.storage[msg.sender] - value
self.storage = self.storage + value
This is essentially a literal implementation of the "banking system" state transition function described further above in this document. A few extra lines of code need to be added to provide for the initial step of distributing the currency units in the first place and a few other edge cases, and ideally a function would be added to let other contracts query for the balance of an address. But that's all there is to it. Theoretically, Ethereum-based token systems acting as sub-currencies can potentially include another important feature that on-chain Bitcoin-based meta-currencies lack: the ability to pay transaction fees directly in that currency. The way this would be implemented is that the contract would maintain an ether balance with which it would refund ether used to pay fees to the sender, and it would refill this balance by collecting the internal currency units that it takes in fees and reselling them in a constant running auction. Users would thus need to "activate" their accounts with ether, but once the ether is there it would be reusable because the contract would refund it each time.
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