TAUcoin debate daily topic 10/23/2018
What are the pros and cons for UTXO (BTC) and account based (ETH) systems?
As we know there are two broad groups with respect to the style of cryptocurrencies transactions UTXO (BTC) and account based (ETH).
In the UTXO transactions, each coin contains essentially two different pieces of data: ownership data, and the amount it represents. Transactions inductively spend outputs generated by previous transactions and create new unspent outputs, and there is no intrinsic notion of an account associated with an address.
In the account based transactions, the currency is spread among the multiple accounts of the system, each of which has a specific balance. Each address is seen as an account with a balance, and transactions are transfers of value from one account to another. Every transaction also contains a unique nonce to protect against replay attacks.
Pros for UTXO:
First, it allows transactions to be processed in parallel for different UTXOs and transactions can be processed in any order. These parallelizability and invariance property lead to scalability benefits.
Second, it is difficult to link accounts to each other because the user uses a new address for each transaction that they receive. It leads to a little higher degree of privacy.
Cons for UTXO:
The main one it is its complexity. Second UTXO basically suited only to asset issuance and transfer applications. It’s more difficult to successfully run smart contracts on it.
Pros for account based are simplicity and efficiency before UTXO.
Simplicity means that it opted for a more intuitive model for the benefit of developers of complex smart contracts.
Efficiency means that each transaction only needs to validate that the sending account has enough balance to pay for the transaction.
Cons for account based main one is a double spending attack. Every transaction must have a "nonce" and the account must keep track of the nonces used.
Some word about TAU. In my opinion TAU devs, team and rising up community should find own decision. Maybe it will combine UTXO and account based. Or it will something innovative brand-new like a Proof of Transaction consensus mechanism. Copies are always worse an original.
References
https://medium.com/@ConsenSys/thoughts-on-utxo-by-vitalik-buterin-2bb782c67e53https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/513.pdfhttps://eprint.iacr.org/2018/262.pdf