Kuber IDE
Kuber IDE is a browser based IDE for complete Plutus smart contracts development. No setup required. Write Plutus contracts, compile them and create transactions, all within the browser.
3 min read
Results
UTXO
Means unspent transaction output. Every address on Cardano is filled with UTxO (unless the address has 0 funds). These UTxOs are products of transactions that deposited money into the address. They are then used to spend money from the address, which consumes the UTxO and delivers funds to another address (and a new UTxO for any remaining balance from current UTxO). An address can be full of many UTxOs. An individual address will not have one UTxO for all possessed funds. This is contrary to Ethereum, which uses an account-based model, like bank accounts. In an account-based model, an address simply has funds, and some is subtracted when money is spent. This is not how Bitcoin or Cardano works because they use the UTxO model. For more information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfofA4MM0QE
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Smart Contract / Policy Script
On Ethereum, smart contracts life on the blockchain as code that performs specific action. This is not how Cardano smart contracts work. It is helpful to think of smart contracts on Cardano as validator scripts. When a smart contract is written, it is turned into a policy script file, containing a hash that represents the code. The contact was full of parameters that legitimize a transaction. So, when a policy script is attached to a transaction on Cardano, it will only go through if all the conditions of the transaction meet the criteria of the smart contract. Therefore, more complicated functions can be performed on Cardano, because there are policy scripts that are regulating the legitimacy of these transactions.
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Consensus Type
The invention of bitcoin brought forth the greatest use case of proof of work. A system that required hardware to use electricity to solve cryptography in order to validate a block on the blockchain. In concern for the environmental demand of energy consumption in this manner, many blockchains thereafter adopted a proof of stake system. Rather than requiring energy to validate blocks, Cardano uses the proof of stake (POS) systems require the ownership of the blockchains cryptocurrency to validate blocks. In this case, rather than the more energy you use being correlated to greater blockchain validation rewards, the more money you have correlates to greater blockchain validation rewards (in this case, knows as staking rewards).
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Slot
Cardano is a blockchain like Bitcoin. As such, it is a chain of blocks that record transactions. A slot is full of blocks that are verified by nodes. There is a new slot every second. A slot does not have to be full of blocks and can be empty. As of writing this (5/30/2022) it is common to say that a block occurs every 20 seconds or 20 slots. But this will largely depend on network traffic.
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Epoch
an epoch represents a period on the Cardano blockchain. It represents a section of time where slot leaders are selected to act as the validators for slots/blocks, a system required by the POS setup. An epoch lasts 5 days. A slot leader is selected for every block, but it is decided at the beginning of each epoch.
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