Comment by mrkeen
No.
At the beginning of time, all your accounts will have their starting value.
When the first transaction (from,to,value) happens, you will do one overdraft check, and if it's good, you will do 1 addition and 1 subtraction, and two of the accounts will have a new value.
On the millionth transaction, you will do one overdraft check, and if it's good, you will do 1 addition and 1 subtraction, and two of the accounts will have a new value.
At no point will you need to do more than one check & one add & one sub per arriving transaction.
(The append-only is what allows this: the next state is only ever a single, cheap step from the current state. But if someone insists upon mutating history, the current state is no longer valid because it no longer represents the history that led up to it, so it cannot be used to generate the next state - you need to throw it all away and regenerate the current/next states, starting from 0 and replaying every transaction again.
Ok so basically you have a Transactions table as well as a separate Accounts table which stores balances, and every time Alices wishes to pay Bob, a (database) transaction appends an entry to the Transaction table and updates balance in Accounts only if the sender’s balance is ok? Something like a “INSERT INTO…SELECT”?