Hodling?

If you’re already on board the bitcoin BTCUSD, +0.84% train, then that’s a term you’ll know well. But perhaps you happened upon it on Twitter... or while listening to a Senate Banking Committee hearing with the U.S.'s top two financial regulators.

Yes, “hodl” made an appearance in testimony from Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman J. Christopher Giancarlo. He had this to say on the issue of whether bitcoin should be classified as a currency, a commodity, or something else:

“When it’s used as a store of value, then it’s very much like an asset, like a commodity. In fact, what we hear a lot of, is people buying and holding. If you go on to the Twitter universe you’ll see a phrase ‘H-O-D-L,’ which means hold on for dear life.”

Read more:Push toward cybercurrency regulation continues as SEC’s Clayton, CFTC’s Giancarlo testify

Giancarlo went on to talk about his 30 year-old niece, who he says is a longtime bitcoin investor. “She’s an hodl,” he said. “She’s not a fraudster, she’s just a kid, and believes in it.” Regulators must step in to snuff out the bad actors in the crypto world, Giancarlo said, “if nothing else, so that people like my niece can have some security.”

We won’t question that Giancarlo knows his stuff, and he gets top marks for the use of “hodl” as both verb and noun. But the term wasn’t an intentional acronym -- it began as what the Urban Dictionary calls an “enthusiastic” typo:

“An enthusiastic misspelling of hold, prompting bitcoin users to avoid the temptation of selling off their coins once price starts rising.”

According to a Reddit thread sniffing out the origin, one language-challenged bitcoin cheerleader accidentally used “hodl” in this 2013 post:

A Reddit user aptly named “Hodlandwait” waxed nostalgic upon revisiting the infamous post:

“For me, going back to those times, I’m like dam. Only a few years ago, we had drunks tearing themselves up by the pc for a trade they thought was insane. The FUD was real back then, we are about to hit a golden era in the next 5-10 years. And everyone on this sub is going to be happy.”

Since that whisky-drenched rant, bitcoin bulls have adopted the term “hodl” as a rally cry. Of course, lately, the rally cries have tended more toward the theme of “Keep calm and HODL on.”