Ethereum accounts - arealive/Viper GitHub Wiki
From a practical standpoint, the EVM can be thought of as a large decentralized computer containing millions of objects, called "accounts", which have the ability to maintain an internal database, execute code and talk to each other.
There are two types of accounts:
- Externally owned account (EOAs): an account controlled by a private key, and if you own the private key associated with the EOA you have the ability to send ether and messages from it.
- Contract/dapp: an account that has its own code, and is controlled by code.1
[1] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethereum-Development-Tutorial