Messages and Transactions

The term “transaction” is used in Ethereum to refer to the signed data package that stores a message to be sent from an externally owned account. Transactions contain:

• the recipient of the message;
• a signature identifying the sender;
• the amount of ether to transfer from the sender to the recipient;
• an optional data field;
• a STARTGAS value, representing the maximum number of computational steps the transaction execution is allowed to take; and
• a GASPRICE value, representing the fee the sender pays per computational step.

The first three are standard fields expected in any cryptocurrency. The data field has no function by default, but the virtual machine has an opcode with which a contract can access the data. As an example use case, if a contract is functioning as an on-blockchain domain registration service, then it may wish to interpret the data being passed to it as containing two “fields”, the first field being a domain to register and the second field being the IP address to register it to. The contract would read these values from the message data and appropriately place them in storage.

The STARTGAS and GASPRICE fields are crucial for Ethereum’s anti-denial-of-service model.[17] In order to prevent accidental or hostile infinite loops or other computational wastage in code, each transaction is required to set a limit to how many computational steps of code execution it can use. The fundamental unit of computation is “gas”; usually, a computational step costs 1 gas, but some operations cost higher amounts of gas because they are more computationally expensive, or increase the amount of data that must be stored as part of the state. There is also a fee of 5 gas for every byte in the transaction data. The intent of the fee system is to require an attacker to pay proportionately for every resource that they consume, including computation, bandwidth and storage; hence, any transaction that leads to the network consuming a greater amount of any of these resources must have a gas fee roughly proportional to the increment.