Crypto Glossary of Terms And Jargon

Fungibility is when all units of something are the same and can act interchangeably. Bitcoin is technically fungible but some governments are taking the approach that the history of a bitcoin matters, so from a political perspective, certain bitcoin may not be fungible. An Exit Scam is when a company runs away with other people’s bitcoin or cryptocurrency. Dusting Attacks are an attack on bitcoin privacy by sending tiny amounts of bitcoin to addresses that have been used in the past in an attempt to link owners of old addresses to new addresses.

Central Processing Unit (CPU)

They are a type of toolkit provided by developers so anyone can integrate a service with other tools or services. Alphanumeric is any combination of numbers and letters to create a larger number or letter set. Alphanumeric sets use all 26 letters of the Latin alphabet and the numbers 0-9. Bitcoin is an innovative payment network and a new kind of money. A field in the block header which contains the SHA256(SHA256()) hash of the previous block’s header. An index number used in the HD wallet formula to generate child keys from a parent key.

• The market cap of bitcoin is the current price multiplied by the total supply.
• Already, our finances don’t inspire a lot of confidence in the dollar.
• Batching is the process of grouping multiple transactions together.
• A scoring mechanism to help ensure that expensive data storage isn’t consumed by lower quality and spam.
• Since its launch, bitcoin has inspired thousands of other cryptocurrencies.
• DDoS attacks are a common way for hacker groups to attack a website in an attempt to overwhelm the server with bot traffic.

AML: Anti Money Laundering

Since its launch, bitcoin has inspired thousands of other cryptocurrencies. While many additional cryptocurrencies have become successful, bitcoin remains the most valuable and popular globally. Bitcoin’s all-time high was on March 14, 2024, trading at $73,750.07 per bitcoin. The lowest intraday price that the crypto traded in the past year was $24,930.30 on Sep. 11, 2023.

Ethereum Difficulty

Dust refers to tiny amounts of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies left in a user’s wallet. The Bitcoin block subsidy refers to the part of the Bitcoin block reward that is given by the Bitcoin network. Block height is a position in a blockchain, counted by the number of confirmed Bitcoin Vocabulary blocks before it. Nodes whose IP addresses are included in the Bitcoin client for use during a new installation when the normal bootstrapping process through IRC wasn’t possible. An orphan block is a block which has no known parent in the currently-longest block chain.

• Anyone in the world is able to become a bitcoin miner however it is incredibly competitive.
• A score indicating the number of blocks on the best block chain that would need to be modified to remove or modify a particular transaction.
• Meanwhile, the bitcoin price has lost the momentum it built up through the first half of 2024, casting doubt over its performance through the rest of the year.
• Layer 2 refers to a secondary framework or protocol built atop an existing blockchain system.
• So, if a system has ten potential vulnerabilities, then its attack surface would be ten.
• Blocks which were successfully mined but which aren’t included on the current best block chain, likely because some other block at the same height had its chain extended first.
• Private keys on most desktop wallets keep the user’s private keys on the client while private keys stored under the custody of a third party are server side.

Fork Choice Rule

The Lightning Network is a layer that is built on top of the bitcoin blockchain to allow for large numbers of microtransactions. A Soft Fork is a change to a piece of software that is backwards compatible and doesn’t create an entirely new blockchain. CoinJoin is a privacy enhancing feature where users generate collaborative transactions to make it more difficult for chain analysis companies to break down user privacy. A Bitcoiner is one who owns bitcoin and uses it as a store of value, a medium of exchange, or a unit of account or any combination of these 3 things. A Bitcoin Address is where you send/receive bitcoin payments to/from.

DanWell, you don’t have to be sceptical about the answer to our quiz. I asked you when the Bitcoin crypto-currency was first created. INSERTRory Cellan-Jones, BBC correspondent A futures contract, a bet on where the currency will be a month from now, soared above 18,000 dollars. That means that investors believe Bitcoin, which started the year worth under 1000 dollars will continue to rise in value, albeit at a slower rate. But at the big banks there’s still plenty of scepticism about the currency.

Seasonal trends suggest activity typically picks up after Monday’s US Labor Day holiday, he added. The fears of punchy sell orders come alongside a thinning of liquidity in the Bitcoin market that can amplify price swings in response to big trades. The digital asset has dropped some 8% so far this month against that backdrop, compared with gains of about 2% in global gauges of stocks and bonds.

The current block’s height encoded into the first bytes of the coinbase field. A chain of certificates connecting a individual’s leaf certificate to the certificate authority’s root certificate. A Soft Fork activated by flag day or node enforcement instead of miner signalling. A flag to Bitcoin signatures that indicates what parts of the transaction the signature signs.

TXID: Transaction ID

A cryptographically-verifiable receipt created using parts of a payment request and a confirmed transaction. The script field of a PaymentDetails where the receiver tells the spender what pubkey scripts to pay. A URI which allows receivers to encode payment details so spenders don’t have to manually enter addresses and other details. The amount remaining when the value of all outputs in a transaction are subtracted from all inputs in a transaction; the fee is paid to the miner who includes that transaction in a block. Blocks which were successfully mined but which aren’t included on the current best block chain, likely because some other block at the same height had its chain extended first. A method for verifying if particular transactions are included in a block without downloading the entire block.