Mastering Ethereum

Quick Glossary

This quick glossary contains many of the terms used in relation to Ethereum. These terms are used throughout the book, so bookmark this for quick reference.

Account

An object containing an address, balance, nonce, and optional storage and code. An account can be a contract account or an externally owned account (EOA).

Address

Most generally, this represents an EOA or contract that can receive (destination address) or send (source address) transactions on the blockchain. More specifically, it is the rightmost 160 bits of a Keccak hash of an ECDSA public key.

Assert

In Solidity, assert(false) compiles to 0xfe, an invalid opcode, which uses up all remaining gas and reverts all changes. When an assert() statement fails, something very wrong and unexpected is happening, and you will need to fix your code. You should use assert() to avoid conditions that should never, ever occur.

Big-endian

A positional number representation where the most significant digit is first. The opposite of little-endian, where the least significant digit is first.

BIPs

Bitcoin Improvement Proposals. A set of proposals that members of the Bitcoin community have submitted to improve Bitcoin. For example, BIP-21 is a proposal to improve the Bitcoin uniform resource identifier (URI) scheme.

Block

A collection of required information (a block header) about the comprised transactions, and a set of other block headers known as ommers. Blocks are added to the Ethereum network by miners. ...