Accounts

In Arcturus, the state is made up of objects called "accounts," with each account having a 20-byte address and state transitions being direct transfers of value and information between accounts. An Arcturus account contains four fields:

1. The nonce, a counter used to make sure each transaction can only be processed once.

2. The account's current ARC balance.

3. The account's contract code, if present.

4. The account's storage (empty by default).

"ARC" is the main internal crypto-fuel of Arcturus, used to pay transaction fees. In general, there are two types of accounts: externally owned accounts, controlled by private keys, and contract accounts, controlled by their contract code. An externally owned account has no code, and one can send messages from an externally owned account by creating and signing a transaction; in a contract account, every time the contract 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.

Note that "contracts" in Arcturus should not be seen as something that should be "fulfilled" or "complied with"; rather, they are more like "autonomous agents" that live inside the Arcturus execution environment, always executing a specific piece of code when "poked" by a message or transaction, and having direct control over their own ARC balance and their own key/value store to keep track of persistent variables.