"Transaction" is used in Ethereum to refer to the signed data package that stores a message to be sent from an externally owned account. Transactions contain six pieces: 
-The recipient of the message
-A signature identifying the sender
-The amount of ether to transfer from the sender to the recipient
-An optional data field
-A STARTGAS value, representing the maximum number of computational steps the transaction execution is allowed to take
-A GASPRICE value, representing the fee the sender pays per computational step

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The term "transaction" is used in Ethereum to refer to the signed data package that stores a message to be sent from an externally owned  account (managed by a human) to another or to interact with a smart contract. 

Ethereums Messages and Transactions 

Buterin, Vitalik. (2013). A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized  

Application Platform. https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/


Ethereum Whitepaper

STARTGAS and GASPRICE are crucial for Ethereum's anti-denial of service model. In order to prevent accidental or hostile infinite loops or other computational wastage in code, each transaction is required to set a limit to how many computational steps of code execution it can use. The fundamental unit of computation is "gas"; usually, a computational step costs 1 gas, although some operations cost higher amounts of gas because they are more computationally complex, or increase the amount of data that must be stored as part of the state. 

Transactions (STARTGAS and GASPRICE)

Messages 

- **from**: The sender's address, who will sign the transaction, must be an externally-owned account (contract accounts are not able to initiate transactions).
- **recipient**: The receiving address, if it's an Externally owned account will transfer value and if it's a smart contract it will execute the code.
- **signature**: The identifier of the sender, who authorizes the transactions
- **nonce**: A counter that indicates the number of transaction from this account.
- **data**: used for storing any data or the contract code.
- **gasLimit**: the limit of gas units for this transactions.
- **maxPriorityFeePerGas**: Gas included as tip to the validator.
- **maxFeePerGas**: The highest cost per unit of gas that someone is willing to pay for the transaction.

Information of a Transaction

Under Ethereum there are three types of transactions.
- Regular transactions.
- Contract deployment transaction.
- Contract executions transaction

Types of Ethereum transaction

For completing a transaction in **Ethereum** involves a process of several stages ever since the moment a transaction is initiated until it is ultimately added to the blockchain. Currently the main following stages  involved in a transaction are: 
1. Transaction creation.
2. Transaction propagation.
3. Transaction selection.
4. Transaction confirmation.


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