General Terms

Bitcoin: the first decentralized digital currency, and currently the best known and most expensive;

Cryptocurrency: a digital asset designed to work as a currency, that uses cryptography to secure its transactions, to control the creation of additional units, and to verify the transfer of assets;

Blockchain: a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography, and acts as the basis for cryptocurrency due to its decentralization and immutability;

Decentralization: the property of not being owned or controlled by a single individual or group of people, thus being more resistant to inside manipulation;

ICO: short for Initial Coin Offering, a means by which funds are raised for a new venture, where some of the cryptocurrency is sold to early backers of the project;

Mining: the process of trying to ‘solve’ the next block to obtain an amount of cryptocurrency. In many cases it requires huge amounts of computer processing power;

Wallet: storage of ‘keys’, or codes, needed to access and use one’s coins. There are online (“hot”) wallets and offline (“cold”) wallets;

Technical Terms



Address: the location from which you would receive, send or hold your currency, generally manifested in a long string of alphanumeric characters;

Altcoin: “alternative coin”, any cryptocurrency that is not Bitcoin;

Distributed Ledger: an agreement of shared, replicable and synchronized data, in this case spread across multiple networks, across many computers;

51% Attack: a situation where more than half of the computing power on a network is operated by a single individual or concentrated group, which use this power to control a network;

Fork: a permanent divergence of an alternative operating version of the current blockchain; come into existence when a 51% attack occurs, a bug in the program, or more commonly a new set of consensus rules come into existence;

Multisig: needing more than one signature to approve a transaction;

P2P or Peer-to-Peer: a system where peers (equally privileged, equipotent participants) share resources amongst each other without the use of a centralized administrative system;

Smart Contract: It’s a computer code that simplifies the execution of certain agreements and eliminates the need for a middleman;

Trading Terms



Exchange: a website where you can buy and sell cryptocurrencies;

Fiat: government-backed cryptocurrency, such as the US dollar or euro;

Whale: someone who owns an obscene amount of cryptocurrency, so that their trading would move the market a lot, the way real whales displace a lot of water around them;

Margin trading: an act of ‘magnifying’ the intensity of your trades by risking your existing coins, often equated to gambling, and forbidden on many exchanges;

Bull/bullish: optimism for prices, the expectation that the price is going to increase;

Bear/bearish: pessimism for prices, the expectation that the price is going to decrease;

ATH: short for all-time high, the biggest value a cryptocurrency has ever reached;

Shilling/pumping: advertising another cryptocurrency by making it sound too good to be true;

Pump and dump: a fraud scheme that originated on Wall Street, where a group of people artificially increase the price of a coin, bringing attention to it, then sell it to unsuspecting victims and watch the price crash;

Bagholder: someone who still holds an altcoin after a pump and dump crash; alternatively, someone who owns a coin that is steadily falling;

Market cap: the total value of a cryptocurrency network, calculated by multiplying the total supply of coins by the current price of an individual unit;

Inside Jokes, Memes and General Abbreviations



HODL: a misspelling of “hold”, means to not sell your cryptocurrencies; alternatively described as meaning Hold On for Dear Life;

Lambo: short for Lamborghini, which is what cryptocurrency enthusiasts want to buy with their crypto trading profits, as opposed to Ferraris (because they’re a “Wall Street thing”);

“This is gentlemen”: originally a misspelling of “this is it, gentlemen”, but now used as a way to point out nice things, such as the rise of your coin of choice;

Mooning: a price going up astronomical levels; an alternative is, “to the moon!”;

FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, a phrase that describes the heightened sense of panic and anxiety which can sometimes affect the prices on the market, usually caused by misinformation;

FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out, getting into cryptocurrency trading so that you do not miss out on the prices eventually surging and thus profiting you;

Shitcoin: an altcoin that turns out to be either worthless or downright scammy;

DYOR: Do Your Own Research, means do not trust everyone on the internet, instead research it by yourself or ask a professional;

Buy the Dip, Sell the Peak: the meaning is literal, if you want to profit, buy the coin when it’s at its lowest and sell it when it rises in price.

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