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Ledger

a.k.a. Ledgers

A record of transactions and balances: who owns what, and who paid whom.
In plain English

A record of transactions and balances: who owns what, and who paid whom.

A ledger is the book of accounts. For centuries it was an actual book: columns of names, amounts and dates. Banks still keep ledgers; they're just in databases now, and only the bank holds the master copy.

A blockchain is a ledger that nobody owns. Thousands of computers keep identical copies and follow the same rules about what gets written in. That's distributed ledger technology. Don't confuse it with Ledger, the company that makes hardware wallets.

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