Ethereum Accounts

In Ethereum, the state is made up of objects called 'accounts'. An account having:

• 20 byte address
• state transitions being direct transfers of value and information between accounts

An ethereum account contains four fields:

• nonce - counter used to make sure each transaction can be processed once
• ether balance - account's current balance
• contract code(optional) - account's contact code
• storage(default - empty) - account's storage

Ether, is the main crypto-fuel of Ethereum and is used to pay transaction fees.

Generally, there are two types of accounts:

• Externally Owned Accounts(EOA)
• controlled by private keys
• has no code
• by creating and signing a transaction, one can send messages
• has following information available to them:
• Total number of Ethers for the account
• Functionalities to send and receive transaction
• Private and Public Keys to manage the account.
• Contract Accounts(CA)
• controlled by their contract code
• every time the account receives a message its code activates, allowing it to read and write to internal storage and send other messages or create contracts in turn
• has following information available to them:
• Total number of Ethers provisioned for the contract.
• Smart Contract Code which is used to run functions and fetch information by the users.
• Code execution functionalities which are triggered by transactions made by users or other contracts.
• Maintain its own permanent storage, which can be used to trigger other functionalities. This storage states that as long the computation power is provided, we can solve all mathematical puzzles.