Hello, it's been a week and I take at least one hour every day to browse and post here on bitcointalk, I'm still a newbie, many times when I joined this particular board (beginners and help) I have seen myself kinda lost with the terms and other topics that are often talked about in here, I took my time to learn a bit about them and if you also have something useful to share, please do.
Blockchains - Every cryptocurrency is a blockchain, bitcoin is a blockchain architecture and alt-coins are normally derivations of it, the technology is a cryptography resistant to data modification and decentralized. But how they do that? By what I understand, every new block created comes with crucial data of the previous block (transaction info, timestamp, and others), and it grows without end. Everything is easily traceable to the genesis, aka the beginning of the chain.
And it's decentralized because it's peer-to-peer based, every node (computer involved) must validate and continue information, and of course there are no central banks involved, thus the huge quantity of coins.
Of course, it's all much more than that, and further thoughts on the topic are welcome.
Scalability problem - It's a big topic, basically it concerns the main problem of blockchains, it's capacity to hold transactions and it's size. Everything has a limit but the growing market don't care, there are so many solutions regarding this limit that new currencies were born out of the difference of ideas.
Alt-coins - Can be named as "Bitcoin alternatives", these are coins based on major block chains architectures (BTC, ETH variants), can have big or minor differences, but normally they are almost-clones. They are less valuable and are in quantity, but some of them stand out, an example I have is Litecoin, that has it's own characteristics and is branded as "Bitcoin silver". By research the first Alt-coin ever was "Namecoin", that is alive and kicking until today.
Cloud mining - A topic of many discussions towards its efficiency, Cloud mining is basically you hiring someone else device to mine for you, your gains are also stored online, there are fees involved and risky of you being scammed depending on the provider you choose, two very famous Cloud Mining services are Genesis and Hashnet.
Wallets - Nothing difficult, it's where you store your stuff, but can be tricky since there are many types of wallets. There are, online wallets which can only be accessed if you have an internet connection, desktop wallets, mobile wallets, hardware wallets (external devices that may store your funds), and I ever heard of paper wallets, literally printed coins that you can store normally.
ICO's - stands for "Initial Coin Offering", by what I understood they are a type of crowd-funding, where you help investing in a promising idea and expect to receive some sort of reward. So for example, if I have a great idea for cryptocurrency and need funding to develop it, instead of begging banks for loans or investors you may open an ICO, the people can either give you cryptocurrency or fiat money, in exchange, they receive some of the new currency when you launch it. People do that because they have hope in your idea, they believe it's gonna be used and the value will rise eventually. Some are promising while others can end up being scam, a very famous case of a scam was Bitconnect, which hilarious ceremony is everywhere on youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD7L2u8N2kYAirdrops - I've seen lots of airdrop topics around here, I had to ask around and read some links to understand more about it, in a crude way it's very simple: cryptocurrency give-away, the dev of an alt-coin or anyone, really, decides to give away his coins or tokens generally for one reason: advertising, simple like that. There are also cases of developers awarding their alt-coin to holders of a particular cryptocurrency like BTC and ETH, in order to advertise a new project etc.
Bounties - Small and really easy jobs you can do for developers (like tweeting and others) and you are paid accordingly.
Tokens - can be understood like "coupons", regular tokens holds no real world asset and the special "security token" holds, and as far as I know, are regulated and probably way more pricey.
So
tokens are like special access to a service or product, buying one you secure your spot for when it's released, just like when a game it's in pre-order. So we link the previous information with this new one, some ICOs sell tokens to raise money and you receive the desired service in exchange, I learned many people even call ICOs "token generators" because of that and to avoid to appear they are offering security tokens.
Security tokens - These hold real-world assets, like a company share or whatever tradable asset, so it must meet some regulatory obligation. As far I understood, these are used by companies looking for investment for a project or something like it.
CPU - stands for
"Central Processing Unit", in the beginning, most miners would use their own machine to mine cryptocurrency, but it's known to be slow and often bogs down the computer. Thus people moved to the nearest options available, video cards.
GPU - stands for
"Graphics Processing Unit", people started using video cards to mine, proving to be much faster but sometimes not so profitable, the necessity for even higher necessity and efficiency gave birth to a new market.
Mining Hardware or ASICs - stands for
"Application-specific integrated circuit", it's basically, hardware built specifically to mine, with minimum energy cost and has an indisputable hash rating, they are normally expensive but they pay off very well.
These are the ones I remember off the top of my head, there are so many things to talk that if posts have character limits, it's not enough to cover. What are some basic knowledge or terms you remember? Please if you see any mistake or addition tell me so I can edit and improve it.
