Self-reproducing Coins as Universal Turing Machine

Abstract

Turing-completeness of smart contract languages in blockchain systems is often associated with a variety of language features (such as loops). On the contrary, we show that Turing-completeness of a blockchain system can be achieved through unwinding the recursive calls between multiple transactions and blocks instead of using a single one. We prove it by constructing a simple universal Turing machine using a small set of language features in the unspent transaction output (UTXO) model, with explicitly given relations between input and output transaction states. Neither unbounded loops nor possibly infinite validation time are needed in this approach.