Bitcoin has no account balances. It has outputs, each one a spendable chunk locked to a condition. A wallet balance is simply the sum of the outputs it can unlock. Spending consumes whole outputs and creates new ones, which is why a transaction sending a small amount often produces a large "change" output back to the sender.
UTXO
An unspent transaction output: a discrete chunk of bitcoin that a future transaction can consume.
Also called: unspent transaction output, UTXOs
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