Bitcoin dictionary

Sharing my bitcoin dictionary.

Cold Storage - Keeping a reserve of Bitcoins offline (such as on a USB).

Confirmation - A Bitcoin transaction is considered confirmed when it reaches a certain amount of blocks deep.

Crypto - Short for cryptography, it means hidden or kept secret.

Cryptocurrency - A digital or virtual currency that uses cryptography for security.

Cryptography - A method of storing and transmitting data in a specific form so that only those for whom it's intended can read and process it.

Decentralized Exchange - An exchange market that does not rely on a third party service to hold the customer's funds.

Digital Currency - Digital currency is an asset represented in digital form and having some monetary characteristics. They represent electronic money (e-money).

Ethereum - A public blockchain-based software platform that enables developers to build and deploy decentralized applications.

Fiat - A currency that a government has declared as legal tender but is not backed by a physical commodity.

Fork (Hard Fork and Soft Fork) - The result when a blockchain diverges into two potential paths. A hard fork involves more radical and permanent changes while a soft fork is a temporary split in the blockchain that is backwards compatible.

HD Wallet - Improves privacy by being able to generate new bitcoin addresses whenever you send and receive funds.

Keys (Private, Public) - A secret number that allows Bitcoins to be spent. A public key is 256 bits long and is used to ensure you are the owner of an address that can receive funds. A public key is also derived from the private key.

Miner Fees - Transaction fee that is received by the bitcoin miner.

Miners - A bitcoin miner is a computer specifically designed to record to Bitcoins ledger of past transactions.

Mining (Mining Pools) - A way for Bitcoin miners to pool their resources together and share their hashing power while splitting the reward equally according to the amount of shares they contributed to solving a block.

P2P (Person to Person) - A user's ability to directly exchange data or take part in digital asset transfers with other users without having to go through an exchange or central authority.

Payment Protocol - The transfer of value from one individual to another in a specific process or sequence of messages that must take place in a particular order.

Private Key - A private key is a secret number that allows Bitcoins to be spent, every Bitcoin wallet contains one or more private keys.
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Satoshi - The name used by the unknown person(s) who designed and created Bitcoin. They also devised the first blockchain database. Further a denomination equal to 1/100th of a Bitcoin.

SEC - The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is a government entity for protecting investors; maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets; as well as facilitating capital formation.

SegWit (Short for Segregated Witness) - SegWit is the process which the block size limit on a blockchain is increased by removing signature data from Bitcoin transactions.

SegWit2x - One of the proposals for boosting Bitcoin's transaction capacity, it seeks to upgrade Bitcoin by enacting Segwit and set a timeline for increasing the network's block size to 2MB.

Signature - A Bitcoin signature allows you to show that you know the private key connected to a public one without having to reveal the private key.

Transaction - An agreement between a buyer and a seller to exhange goods, services or financial instruments.

Virtual currency - A virtual currency is a digital representation of value, not issued by a central bank, credit institution or e-money institution which can be used as an alternative to money.

Wallet - A wallet is a software program where Bitcoins are stored.