Select what genuinely interests you. Your picks feed directly into our editorial planning. A cryptocurrency is digital money whose balances sit in a public ledger that thousands of computers keep at the same time and constantly reconcile with one another. For a payment to count, nobody has to trust a bank: it is enough that the majority of those computers recognise the same order of entries. What you own is therefore neither a coin nor a file on your hard drive, but an entry in that ledger plus the cryptographic key that lets you pass it on.