Notes
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Smart contracts can be thought of as "autonomous agents" that live inside of the Ethereum execution environment, always executing a specific piece of code when "poked" by a message or transaction, and having direct control over their own ether balance and their own key/value store to keep track of persistent variables.
Ethereum address of an EOA account is the last 20 bytes (least significant bytes) of the Keccak-256 hash of the public key of the EOA’s key pair.
Nonce: A scalar value equal to the number of transactions sent from the EOA account or, in the case of Contract accounts, it is the number of contract-creations made by the account. (See )
Contract creation transactions are sent to a special destination address called the zero address i.e. 0x0. A contract creation transaction contains a data payload with the compiled bytecode to create the contract. An optional ether amount in the value field will create the new contract with a starting balance.
Transactions vs Messages:
A transaction is produced by an EOA where an external actor sends a signed data package which either: 1) triggers a message to another EOA where it leads to a transfer of value or 2) triggers a message to a contract account where it leads to the recipient contract account running its code
A message is either: 1) triggered by a transaction to another EOA or contract account or 2) triggered internally within the EVM by a contract account when it executes the CALL family of opcodes and leads to the recipient contract account running its code or value transfer to the recipient EOA
EVM does not follow the standard von Neumann architecture. Rather than storing program code in generally accessible memory or storage, it is stored separately in a virtual ROM accessible only through a specialized instruction.
EVM uses big-endian ordering where the most significant byte of a word is stored at the smallest memory address and the least significant byte at the largest
A transaction reverts for different exceptional conditions such as running out of gas, invalid instructions etc. in which case all state changes made so far are discarded and the original state of the account is restored as it was before this transaction executed.
