Ripple and several other companies working in the online world aim to fix that with a technology known by the yawn-producing term “distributed ledger.”

Its possibilities are anything but dull, however: Mr. Larsen imagines that the technology could go far beyond accommodating financial transactions among people and eventually enable self-driving cars to pay for tolls, parking and fuel without the help of humans. Home energy meters with ledgers might buy different sources of energy. Jet engines could record the installation of new parts and pay for maintenance on the spot.

Like many things in tech, a distributed ledger is a seemingly complex idea that is actually built on a very simple one.

Since the dawn of record-keeping, ledgers have been where receipts and disbursements of cash and goods are recorded. If you buy a sandwich at a deli, for example, several ledgers come into play. The money you carry to pay for it registers a slight deduction on your personal ledger. The deli owner’s ledger records a gain in one place and in another a payment for the ham it bought from a supplier. A ledger at the bank records the deposit it receives from the deli owner.

In a world where every business has its own books, payments tend to stop and start between different ledgers. An overseas transfer leaves the ledger of one business, then goes on another ledger at a domestic bank. It then might hit the ledger of a bank in the international transfer system. It travels to another bank in the foreign country, before ending up on the ledger of the company being paid.