Glossary
Sources: CoinMarketCap and Wikipedia
Algorithm
A process or set of rules to be followed in problem-solving or calculation operations, usually by a computer, although humans tend to follow steps algorithmically as well (lets say doing math or following a recipe).
All-Time-High (ATH)
The highest point (in price, in market capitalization) that a cryptocurrency has been in history. *see All-Time-Low (ATL).
All-Time-Low (ATL)
The lowest point (in price, in market capitalization) that a cryptocurrency has been in history. *see All-Time-High (ATH).
Altcoin
As Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency that captured the worlds imagination, all other coins were subsequently termed altcoins, as in alternative coins.
Anti-Money Laundering (AML)
A set of international laws enacted to curtail criminal organizations or individuals laundering money through cryptocurrencies into real-world cash.
API
API stands for Application Programming Interface. It is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. APIs specify how software components should interact, such as what data to use and what actions should be taken.
Arbitrage
A practice of taking advantage of differences in price of the same commodity in two or more markets or exchanges. For example, cryptocurrency prices on Korean exchanges can be different from those on US exchanges. An arbitrage trader would be in both markets in order to buy in one and sell in another for profit.
Ashdraked
A situation where you lose all your money, more specifically when you lose all your money shorting Bitcoin. This was based on a story of a Romanian trader who continued to short BTC when it went from $300 to $500, since he had made a lot of profit doing so historically. Adapt your trading strategy!
ASIC
Short for Application Specific Integrated Circuit it is a mining equipment that is used specifically to mine a certain cryptocurrency. Often compared to GPUs, ASICs are specially created and bought for mining purposes and offer significant efficiency improvements and power savings due to its narrow use case.
Ask Price
In any financial market, buyers and sellers place their orders to determine the highest price they are willing to buy and the lowest price they are willing to sell. The buyers place bids and sellers place asks, or offers to sell. If a bid is higher than an ask, a trade occurs, as the buyer is willing to pay more than what the seller wants. At any given point in time, the lowest ask order that is unmatched becomes the Ask Price of the market.
Atomic Swap
A way of letting people directly exchange one type of cryptocurrency for another on a different blockchain or off-chain without a centralized intermediary such as an exchange.
Bag
A significant quantity of a specific cryptocurrency is considered a bag. How many depends on the definition of the person using the expression. *see Bagholder.
Bagholder
A person who holds large quantities, or bags, of a cryptocurrency. Often used to describe such a person when the price of that cryptocurrency is declining.
Bear
A person who is pessimistic about market prices and expects them to decline. This person is also known to be bearish about the market or price. *see Bull.
Bear Trap
A technique played by a group of traders, aimed at manipulating the price of a cryptocurrency. The bear trap is set by selling a large amount of the same cryptocurrency at the same time, fooling the market into thinking there is an upcoming price decline. In response, other traders sell their assets, further driving the price down. Those who set the trap then release it, buying back their assets at a lower price. The price then rebounds, allowing them to make a profit.
Bitcoin ATM (BTM)
A machine from which you can withdraw bitcoin.
Bits
A sub-unit of one bitcoin. There are 1,000,000 bits in one bitcoin.
Block
A container or collection of transactions occurring every time period on a blockchain.
Block Explorer
An online tool to view all transactions that has taken place on the blockchain, network hash rate and transaction growth, among other useful information.
Block Height
The number of blocks preceding the block in question on the blockchain, or can be thought of as total blocks in the chain before this point.
Block Reward
An incentive for a miner who successfully calculates a valid hash in a block during mining. By contributing to the security and liveness of the chain, the miner is rewarded with this incentive, ensuring that miners continue to act in the best interest of the blockchain by legitimately taking part in the process (instead of hacking it).
Blockchain
A blockchain is a continuously growing, append-only, list of records called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography.
Bots
Automated trading software bots that execute trade orders extremely quickly, based on a preset algorithm of buy-and-sell rules.
Brute Force Attack
A method of trial-and-error in which automated software generates and tries a large number of possible combinations in order to crack a code or key.
Bubble
A bubble describes a situation where market participants drive prices up above their value, which is usually followed by a steep, rapid drop in prices as the market corrects.
Bull
A person that is optimistic and confident that market prices will increase. This person is also known to be bullish about the market or price. *see Bear.
Bull Trap
A false market signal where the declining trend of an asset appears to be on the upturn, but does not actually materialize, leading bulls to lose money after going long.
Buy The (F*******) Dip (BTD/BTFD)
An enthusiastic exclamation by supporters of a cryptocurrency to buy while prices are at a low point.
Buy Wall
A situation where a large limit order has been placed to buy when a cryptocurrency reaches a certain value. This can sometimes be used by traders to create a certain impression in the market, preventing a cryptocurrency from falling below that value, as demand will likely outstrip supply when the order is executed.
Candlesticks
A candlestick chart is a graphing technique used to show changes in price over time. Each candle provides 4 points of information: opening price, closing price, high, and low. Also known as candles for short.
Cash
Cash is physical form of a currency, such as banknotes or coins.
Central Ledger
A ledger maintained by a centralized agency (such as a bank) that records all financial transactions.
Central Processing Unit (CPU)
Central Processing Unit, also known as a processor or CPU, is defined as the brains of the computer, coordinating different components running on a computer. CPU clock speed is measured in gigahertz or GHz for short.
Centralized
An organization structure in which a small number of nodes is in control of an entire network.
Close
Refers to the closing price
Cloud Mining
Mining with remote processing power rented from companies operating outfits in countries like Iceland, where the electricity is abundant and cost-efficient, and the ambient temperature is cold year-round. Another term for this is mining contract.
Coin
A coin is a cryptocurrency that can operate independently.
Cold Storage
Offline storage of cryptocurrencies, typically involving hardware non-custodial wallets, USBs, offline computers or paper wallets. *see Hot Storage.
Cold Wallet
A cryptocurrency wallet that is in cold storage, i.e. not connected to the internet.
Confirmations
A transaction is only confirmed when it is included in a block on the blockchain, at which point it has one confirmation. Each additional block is another confirmation. Different exchanges require a different number of confirmations to consider a cryptocurrency transaction final.
Consensus
Consensus is achieved when all participants of the network agree on the order and content of blocks and transactions contained in those blocks.
Correction
A correction is a (usually negative) reverse movement of at least 10% in a cryptocurrency or general market, to adjust for over- or under-valuations.
Cryptocurrency
A cryptocurrency is a digital medium of exchange using strong cryptography to secure financial transactions, control the creation of additional units, and verify the transfer of assets.
Cryptographic Hash Function
Cryptographic hashes produce a fixed-size and unique hash value from variable-size transaction input. The SHA-256 algorithm is an example of a cryptographic hash function.
Cryptography
A field of study and practice to secure information, preventing third parties from reading information to which they are not privy.
Dark Web
A portion of internet content existing on darknets, not indexed by search engines, that can only be accessed with specific software, configurations or authorizations.
Decentralized
Decentralization refers to the property of a system in which nodes or actors work in concert in a distributed fashion to achieve a global goal.
Decentralized Applications (DApps)
A type of application that runs on a decentralized network, avoiding a single point of failure.
Decentralized Autonomous Initial Coin Offerings (DAICO)
A method for decentralized funding of projects, combining ideas from Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and initial coin offerings (ICOs), proposed by Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum. It introduces a form of governance in the ICO process, allowing backers to vote for the return of their funds if certain conditions are met.
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO)
An organization that is run through rules encoded in smart contracts.
Decentralized Exchange (DEX)
A peer-to-peer exchange that allows users to buy and sell cryptocurrency and other assets without a central intermediary involved.
Decryption
The process of transforming data that has been rendered unreadable through encryption back to its unencrypted form.
DeFi
DeFi (decentralized finance) is the creation of an ecosystem of financial tools built on blockchain. Also known as open finance, DeFi apps take traditional financial services and rebuild them as open and permissionless.
Deflation
Reduction of the general level of prices in an economy. May also refer to deflationary monetary policy, such as Bitcoin, where there is a fixed supply of coins.
Delegated Proof-of-Stake (dPOS)
A consensus mechanism where users can vote for delegates producing blocks on the blockchain, with votes proportional to their stake. It aims to increase efficiency and environmental friendliness of blockchain consensus protocols.
Depth Chart
A graph that plots the requests to buy (bids) and the requests to sell (asks) on a chart, based on limit orders. The chart shows the point at which the market is most likely to accept a transaction.
Derivative
A contract deriving its value from the performance of an underlying asset, index or interest rate.
Derivatives Market
A public market for derivatives, instruments such as futures contracts or options, which are derived from other forms of cryptocurrency assets.
Difficulty
A relative measure of how difficult it is to discover a new block. In Bitcoin, the difficulty is adjusted periodically as a function of how much hashing power has been deployed by the network of miners.
Digital Currency
Digital currency, also known as digital money or electronic money or electronic currency, is a type of currency available only in digital form, allowing for instantaneous transactions and borderless transfer-of-ownership.
Distributed Consensus
Collective agreement by various computers in a network enabling it to work in a decentralized manner without a central authority.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack
A cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable, disrupting services of a host connected to the internet, by overloading the system with requests so that legitimate requests cannot be served.
Distributed Ledger
Distributed ledgers are ledgers in which data is stored across a network of decentralized nodes. A distributed ledger does not necessarily involve a cryptocurrency and may be permissioned and private.
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)
The technology underlying distributed ledgers. This term is most often discussed in the context of enterprise use cases around adoption of distributed ledger technology.
Distributed Network
A type of network where processing power and data are spread over the nodes without a centralized data center or authority.
Dolphin
A person who owns a moderate quantity of cryptocurrency. This person does not qualify to be a whale, but has evolved from being a fish/minnow.
Dominance
Also known as BTC Dominance for Bitcoin Dominance, it is an index that compares the market capitalization of Bitcoin with the overall market cap of all other cryptocurrencies in existence.
Double Spending
A situation where a sum of money is (illegitimately) spent more than once.
Dump
To sell off all your coins.
Dumping
The action of collective market sell-offs, creating downward price movement.
Dust Transactions
Minuscule transactions that flood and slow the network, usually deliberately created by people looking to disrupt it.
Dusting Attack
When a scammer sends tiny amounts of a cryptocurrency to random users wallets, and then analyzes and tracks the subsequent transactions in order to identify the specific users behind each address.
DYOR
Age old adage: Do Your Own Research. Dont just take people at their word.
Emission
Emission, also known as Emission Curve, Emission Rate and Emission Schedule, is the speed at which new coins are created and released.
ERC-20
A token standard for Ethereum, used for smart contracts implementing tokens. It is a common list of rules defining interactions between tokens, including transfer between addresses and data access.
ERC-721
A token standard for non-fungible Ethereum tokens. An Ethereum Improvement Proposal introduced in 2017, it enables smart contracts to operate as tradeable tokens similar to ERC-20 tokens.
Ether
The form of payment used in the operation of the distribution application platform, Ethereum, in order to incentivize machines into executing the requested operations.
Exchange
Cryptocurrency exchanges (sometimes called digital currency exchanges) are businesses that allow customers to trade cryptocurrencies for fiat money or other cryptocurrencies.
Exchange Traded Fund (ETF)
A security that tracks a basket of assets such as stocks, bonds, and cryptocurrencies but can be traded like a single stock.
Fiat
Fiat currency is legal tender backed by the institution of a central government, such as the Federal Reserve, and with its own banking system, such as fractional reserve banking. It can take the form of physical cash, or it can be represented electronically, such as with bank credit.
Fiat-Pegged Cryptocurrency
Also known as pegged cryptocurrency, it is a coin, token or asset issued on a blockchain that is linked to a government- or bank-issued currency. Each pegged cryptocurrency is guaranteed to have a specific cash value in reserves at all times.
Fish
A fish, or minnow, is someone who holds insignificant amounts of cryptocurrencies, often at the mercy of whales who move the market up and down. *see Dolphin and Whale.
Flippening
A situation hoped for by Ethereum fans, where the total market cap of Ethereum surpasses the total market cap of Bitcoin.
Flipping
An investment strategy (mostly popularized by real estate investing) where you buy something with the goal of reselling for a profit later, usually in a short period of time. In the context of ICOs, flipping refers to the strategy of investing in tokens before they are listed on exchanges, then quickly reselling them for a profit when they start trading on exchanges in the secondary market.
FOMO
An acronym that stands for Fear of Missing Out and in the context of investing, refers to the feeling of apprehension for missing out on a potentially profitable investment opportunity and regretting it later. *see JOMO.
Fork (Blockchain)
Forks, or chain splits, create an alternate version of the blockchain, leaving two blockchains to run simultaneously. An example is Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, which was forked after the DAO hack.
Fork (Software)
A software fork, also known as a project fork, is when developers take the technology (source code) from one existing software project and modify it to create a new project. An example is Litecoin, which was a software fork of Bitcoin.
FUD
An acronym that stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. It is a strategy to influence perception of certain cryptocurrencies or the cryptocurrency market in general by spreading negative, misleading or false information. *see FUDster.
FUDster
Someone that is spreading FUD.
Futures
A futures contract is a standardized legal agreement to buy or sell a particular commodity or asset at a predetermined price at a specified time in the future. They are different from forward contracts, which can be customized for each trade and can be conducted over-the-counter, instead of being traded on an exchange.
Gains
Gains refer to an increase in value or profit.
Gas
A term used on the Ethereum platform that refers to a unit of measuring the computational effort of conducting transactions or smart contracts, or launch DApps in the Ethereum network. It is the fuel of the Ethereum network. *see Gas Limit and Gas Price.
Gas Limit
A term used on the Ethereum platform that refers to the maximum amount of gas the user is willing to spend on a transaction.
Gas Price
A term used on the Ethereum platform that refers to the price you are willing to pay for a transaction. Setting a higher gas price will incentivize miners to prioritize that transaction over others.
Genesis Block
The first block of data that is processed and validated to form a new blockchain, often referred to as block 0 or block 1.
Hacking
Hacking is the process of using a computer to manipulate another computer or computer system in an unauthorized fashion.
Halving
An event in which the total rewarded bitcoin per confirmed block halves, happening every 210,000 blocks mined.
Hard Cap
The maximum amount that an ICO will raise. If a hard cap is reached, no more funds will be collected. *see Soft Cap.
Hash
The act of performing a hash function on input data of arbitrary size, with an output of fixed length that looks random and from which no data can be recovered without a cipher. An important property of a hash is that the output of hashing a particular document will always be the same when using the same algorithm.
Hash Function
Any function used to map data of arbitrary size to data of a fixed size. *see Cryptographic Hash Function.
Hash Power / Hash Rate
A unit of measurement for the amount of computing power being consumed by the network to continuously operate. The Hash Rate of a computer may be measured in kH/s, MH/s, GH/s, TH/s, PH/s or EH/s depending on the hashes per second being produced.
HODL
A type of passive investment strategy where you hold an investment for a long period of time, regardless of any changes in the price or markets. The term first became famous due to a typo made in a Bitcoin forum, and the term is now commonly expanded to stand for Hold On for Dear Life.
Hot Storage
The online storage of private keys allowing for quicker access to cryptocurrencies. *see Cold Storage.
Hot Wallet
A cryptocurrency wallet that is connected to the internet for hot storage of cryptoassets, as opposed to an offline, cold wallet with cold storage. *See Cold Wallet.
Inflation
A general increase in prices and fall in the purchasing value of money.
Initial Bounty Offering (IBO)
An initial bounty offering or IBO is the limited-time process by which a new cryptocurrency is made public and distributed to people who invest time and skill into earn rewards in the new cryptocurrency, such as doing translation or marketing. Unlike an initial coin offering where you can buy coins, an IBO requires more mental commitment from the receiver.
Initial Coin Offering (ICO)
A type of crowdfunding, or crowdsale, using cryptocurrencies as a means of raising capital for early-stage companies. It has come under fire due to the occurrence of scams and market manipulators.
Initial Exchange Offering
An initial exchange offering (IEO) refers to a fundraising event where a cryptocurrency exchange raises money on its own platform, as opposed to an ICO, where a team conducts the fundraising. *See Initial Coin Offering.
Initial Token Offering (ITO)
Similar to ICOs, but the focus is on the offering of tokens with proven (or unproven) intrinsic utility in the form of software or usage in an ecosystem.
Instamine
A period in time, shortly after launch, when a large portion of total mineable coins or tokens are mined in a compressed time frame, and may be unevenly and quickly distributed to investors.
Intermediary / Middleman
An intermediary, or middleman, is a person or entity that acts as the go-between different parties to bring about agreements or carry out directives.
KYC
Acronym for Know Your Customer, this process refers to a projects or financial institutions obligations to verify the identity of a customer in line with global anti-money laundering laws.
Lambo
Shorthand for Lamborghini, an exotic car that people often refer to in their excitement over getting rich from cryptocurrencies. Often used in cryptocurrency communities when asking when prices may rise again by saying: When Lambo? It is usually combined with When moon?
Ledger
A record of financial transactions that cannot be changed, only appended with new transactions.
Leverage
A loan offered by a broker on an exchange during margin trading to increase the availability of funds in trades.
Lightning Network
The Lightning Network is a second layer payment protocol that operates on top of a blockchain. Theoretically, it will enable fast, scalable transactions between and across participating nodes, and has been touted as a solution to the Bitcoin scalability problem.
Limit Order / Limit Buy / Limit Sell
Orders placed by traders to buy or sell a cryptocurrency when a certain price is reached. This is in contrast with market orders at which a cryptocurrency is sold at the current best available price.
Liquidity
How easily a cryptocurrency can be bought and sold without impacting the overall market price.
Long
A situation where you buy a cryptocurrency with the expectation of selling it at a higher price for profit later.
Mainnet
An independent blockchain running its own network with its own technology and protocol. It is a live blockchain where its own cryptocurrencies or tokens are in use, as compared to a testnet or projects running on top of other popular networks such as Ethereum.
Margin Trading
A practice where a trader uses borrowed funds from a broker to trade a cryptocurrency, which forms the collateral for the loan from the broker. It can be relatively risky for inexperienced traders who may receive a margin call if the market moves in the opposite direction of their trades.
Market
An area or arena, online or offline, in which commercial dealings are conducted. Usually referred to as the crypto market, which refers to the cumulative cryptocurrencies and projects operating within the industry.
Market Capitalization / Market Cap / MCAP
Total capitalization of a cryptocurrencys price. It is one of the ways to rank the relative size of a cryptocurrency. *see Circulating Supply.
Market Order / Market Buy / Market Sell
A purchase or sale of a cryptocurrency on an exchange at the current best available price. Market orders are filled as buyers and sellers are willing to trade. This is in contrast with limit orders at which a cryptocurrency is sold only at a specified price.
Max Supply
The best approximation of the maximum amount of coins that will ever exist in the lifetime of the cryptocurrency. *see Circulating Supply and Total Supply.
Microtransaction
A business model where very small payments can be made in exchange for common digital goods and services, such as pages of an ebook or items in a game.
Mineable
Some cryptocurrencies have a system through which miners can be rewarded with newly-created cryptocurrencies for creating blocks through contributing their hash power. Cryptocurrencies with this ability to generate new cryptocurrencies through the process of confirmation is said to be mineable.
Miners
Contributors to a blockchain taking part in the process of mining. They can be professional miners or organizations with large-scale operations, or hobbyists who set up mining rigs at home or in the office.
Mining
A process where blocks are added to a blockchain, verifying transactions. It is also the process through which new bitcoin or some altcoins are created.
Mining Pool
A setup where multiple miners combine their computing power to gain economies of scale and competitiveness in finding the next block on a blockchain. Rewards are split according to different agreements, depending on the mining pool. Another term for this is Group Mining.
Mining Reward
The reward resulting from contributing computing resources to process transactions. Mining rewards are usually a mix of newly-minted coins and transaction fees.
Mining Rig
A computer being used for mining. A mining rig could be a dedicated piece of hardware for mining, or a computer with spare capacity that can be used for other tasks, only mining part time.
Mnemonic Phrase
A mnemonic phrase (also known as mnemonic seed, or seed phrase) is a list of words used in sequence to access or restore your cryptocurrency assets. It should be kept secret from everyone else. It is a standard in most HD wallets.
Mnemonics
Mnemonics are memory aids with a system such as letters or associations that help in recall. *see Mnemonic Phrase.
Money Transmitter/Money Transfer License
In the legal code of the United States, a money transmitter or money transfer service is a business entity that provides money transfer services or payment instruments, whether it is real currency, cryptocurrency or any other value. Money transmitters in the US are part of a larger group of entities called money service businesses or MSBs.
Moon
A situation where there is a continuous upward movement in the price of a cryptocurrency. Often used in communities to question when a cryptocurrency will experience such a phenomenon, saying: When moon? It is usually combined with When Lambo?
Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD)
A technical analysis method, it is a trend-following momentum indicator that shows the relationship between two price moving averages. The calculation is done by subtracting the 26-day exponential moving average (EMA) from the 12-day EMA.
Network
A network refers to all nodes in the operation of a blockchain at any given moment in time.
No-coiner
A no-coiner is someone who has no cryptocurrency in his or her investment portfolio and firmly believes that cryptocurrency in general will fail.
Node
A copy of the ledger operated by a participant of the blockchain network.
Offline Storage
The act of storing cryptocurrencies in devices or systems not connected to the internet. *see Online Storage.
Online Storage
The act of storing cryptocurrencies in devices or systems connected to the internet. Online storage offers more convenience but also increased risk of theft. *see Offline Storage.
Open Source
Open source software is a type of software released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. It is also a philosophy, with participants believing in the free and open sharing of information in pursuit of the greater common good.
Open/Close
The price at which a cryptocurrency opens at a time period, for example at the start of the day
Option
A contract giving the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell an underlying asset or instrument at a specified strike price. There are American and European options, the former of which may be exercised at any time before expiration, and the latter exercised only at the expiration date.
Options Market
A public market for options, giving the buyer an option to buy or sell a cryptocurrency at a specific strike price, on or before a specific date.
Over The Counter (OTC)
Over-the-counter is defined as a transaction made outside of an exchange, often peer-to-peer through private trades. In jurisdictions where exchanges are disallowed or where amounts traded will move the markets, traders will go through the OTC route.
Pair
Trade between one cryptocurrency and another, for example, the trading pair: BTC/ETH.
Paper Wallet
A physical document containing your private key or seed phrase.
Peer to Peer (P2P)
The decentralized interactions between parties in a distributed network, partitioning tasks or workloads between peers.
Phishing
When a scammer pretends to be a trusted institution or person to trick people into revealing sensitive information such as Social Security numbers, passwords, banking details, etc., often through a malware link disguised as legitimate.
Ponzi Scheme
A fraudulent investment involving the payment of purported returns to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors.
Portfolio
A collection of cryptocurrencies or crypto assets held by an investment company, hedge fund, financial institution or individual.
Private Key / Secret Key
A piece of code generated in asymmetric-key encryption process, paired with a public key, to be used in decrypting information hashed with the public key.
Proof-of-Stake (PoS)
A blockchain consensus mechanism involving choosing the creator of the next block via various combinations of random selection and wealth or age of staked coins or tokens. *see Proof-of-Work (PoW).
Proof-of-Work (PoW)
A blockchain consensus mechanism involving solving of computationally intensive puzzles to validate transactions and create new blocks. *see Proof-of-Stake (PoS).
Public Address
A public address is the cryptographic hash of a public key, allowing the user to use it as an address to request for payment.
Public Blockchain
A blockchain that can be accessed by anyone.
Pump and Dump
A pump-and-dump scheme is a type of fraud in which the offenders accumulate a commodity over a period, then artificially inflate the price through means of spreading misinformation (pumping), before selling off what they bought to unsuspecting buyers at the higher price (dumping).
QR Code
A machine-readable label that shows information encoded into a graphical black-and-white pattern. For cryptocurrencies, it is often used to easily share wallet addresses with others.
REKT
A shorthand slang for wrecked, describing a bad loss in a trade.
Relative Strength Index (RSI)
A form of technical analysis that serves as a momentum oscillator, measuring the speed and change of price movements, developed by J. Welles Wilder. It oscillates between zero and 100, where a cryptocurrency is considered overbought when the indicator is above 70 and oversold when below 30.
ROI
Short for Return on Investment, the ratio between the net profit and cost of investing.
Satoshi (SATS)
The smallest unit of bitcoin with a value of 0.00000001 BTC.
Satoshi Nakamoto
The individual or group of individuals that created Bitcoin. The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto has never been confirmed.
Scam
A fraudulent or deceptive cryptocurrency, person, service or website.
Sell Wall
A situation where a large limit order has been placed to sell when a cryptocurrency reaches a certain value. This can sometimes be used by traders to create a certain impression in the market, preventing a cryptocurrency from rising above that value, as supply will likely outstrip demand when the order is executed.
SHA-256
A cryptographic hash function that generates a 256-bit signature for a text, used in Bitcoin proof-of-work (PoW). Standing for Secure Hash Algorithm, it is one of the SHA-2 algorithms, first designed by the NSA.
Shorting
A trading technique in which a trader borrows an asset in order to sell it, with the expectation that the price will continue to decline. In the event that the price does decline, the short seller will then buy the asset at this lower price in order to return it to the lender of the asset, making the difference in profit.
Silk Road
An online black market that existed on the dark web, now shut down by the FBI. It had accepted bitcoins for transactions.
Smart contract
A smart contract is a computer protocol intended to facilitate, verify, or enforce a contract on the blockchain without third parties.
Soft Cap
The minimum amount that an initial coin offering (ICO) wants to raise. Sometimes, if the ICO is unable to raise the soft cap amount, it may be called off entirely. *see Hard Cap.
Soft Fork (Blockchain)
A protocol upgrade where only previously valid transactions are made invalid, with most soft forks requiring miners to upgrade their mining software in order to enforce it. *see Hard Fork.
Staking
Participation in a proof-of-stake (PoS) system to put your tokens in to serve as a validator to the blockchain and receive rewards.
Symbol
The ticker of a cryptocurrency
Tangle
The Tangle is a blockchain alternative developed by IOTA, using directed acyclic graphs which only builds in one single direction and in a way that it never repeats, and is quantum-computing resistant.
Technical Analysis / Trend Analysis (TA)
An evaluation method involving statistical analyses of market activity, such as price and volume. Charts and other tools are used to identify patterns to underpin and drive investment decisions.
Testnet
An alternative blockchain used by developers for testing.
Think Long Term (TLT)
A mindset where you have a longer-term investment horizon of months to years.
Token
A digital unit designed with utility in mind, providing access and use of a larger crypto economic system. It does not have a store of value on its own, but is made so that software can be developed around it.
Tokenize
The process by which real-world assets are turned into something of digital value called a token, often subsequently able to offer ownership of parts of this asset to different owners.
Total Supply
The total amount of coins in existence right now, minus any coins that have been verifiably burned. *see Circulating Supply and Max Supply.
Trade Volume
The amount of the cryptocurrency that has been traded in the last 24 hours.
Transaction (TX)
The act of exchanging cryptocurrencies on a blockchain.
Transaction Fee
A payment for using the blockchain to transact.
Venture Capital
A form of private equity provided to fund small, early-stage firms considered to have high growth potential.
Volatility
A statistical measure of dispersion of returns, measured by using the standard deviation or variance between returns from that same security or market index.
Volume
The amount of cryptocurrency that has been traded during a certain period of time, such as the last 24 hours or more. Volume can show the direction and movement of the cryptocurrency as well as a prediction of future price and its demand.
Wallet
A cryptocurrency wallet is a secure digital wallet used to store, send, and receive digital currency, and are divided into two categories: hosted wallets and cold wallets.
Wash Trade
A form of market manipulation in which investors create artificial activity in the marketplace by simultaneously selling and buying the same cryptocurrencies.
Weak Hands
An investor prone to panic selling at the first sign of a price decline.
Whale
A term used to describe investors who have uncommonly large amounts of crypto, especially those with enough funds to manipulate the market. *see Fish/Minnow and Dolphin.
Whitepaper
A document prepared by an ICO project team to interest investors with its vision, cryptocurrency use and cryptoeconomic design, technical information, and a roadmap for how it plans to grow and succeed.
YTD
Stands for Year to Date.