The Ultimate Bitcoin Glossary

Bitcoin Vocabulary

A random series of 12 to 24 words generated by your crypto wallet and used to gain access to it. A market in which players must follow certain rules of risk fines and/or the loss of their operating licenses. A computer science field that uses principles of quantum physics to process much larger data sets at much greater speeds than traditional computing methods. The process of making digital information into a form that prevents unauthorized access.

Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet (HD Wallet)

Bitcoin Vocabulary

WIF is most commonly found on paper wallets so that it can be imported to another wallet. An orphan block, also known as a stale block, is a valid block that is mined at almost the exact same time as another valid block which causes a short term split in the blockchain. Only one of the 2 chains will be built upon and the other will be dropped or “orphaned” and reverted back to the MemPool to await confirmation. A Mining Contract is a term in bitcoin cloud mining that states the terms or renting or leasing the use of a bitcoin miner. If you do not want to run your own bitcoin miners, you can sign a mining contract to earn all of the bitcoin mined by a particular miner for a predetermined amount of time. An HD Wallet is short for Hierarchically Deterministic wallet.

Time-Weighted Automated Market Maker (TWAMM)

Bitcoin Vocabulary

A Block Explorer is a tool that allows users to view information within a blockchain. The total amount of currency being traded in the open market at any given moment. In cryptocurrency markets, volume is typically referenced to in a 24-hour period. A program that executes itself on a blockchain when certain conditions are met, without the need for human intervention or an intermediary. Refers to a transaction between two people without an intermediary or central authority involved.

Distributed Network

Peer-to-peer refers to systems that work like an organized collective by allowing each individual to interact directly with the others. In the case of Bitcoin, the network is built in such a way that each user is broadcasting the transactions of other users. A block is a record in the block chain that contains and confirms many waiting transactions. Roughly every 10 minutes, on average, a new block including transactions is appended to the block chain through mining.

Bitcoin Vocabulary

A hash digest displayed with the byte order reversed; used in Bitcoin Core RPCs, many block explorers, and other software. Replacing one version of an unconfirmed transaction with a different version of the transaction that pays a higher transaction fee. The data structure used to refer to a particular transaction output, consisting of a 32-byte TXID and a 4-byte output index number (vout). Blocks whose parent block has not been processed by the local node, so they can’t be fully validated yet.

  • The number of confirmations for transactions may change after a reorg, and transactions that are not in the new chain will become “0/unconfirmed” again.
  • A Micro-Transaction is a very small payment that wasn’t possible until the invention of bitcoin.
  • If you’re new to cryptocurrency and find yourself struggling to connect the dots because you need to consult a dictionary at every turn, you’re not alone.
  • The information can only be decrypted and read with the necessary key.
  • A Payment Channel is a type of smart contract that takes place between two parties on the lightning network.
  • All on-chain transactions are publicly recorded and visible on the blockchain.
  • An output in a transaction which returns satoshis to the spender, thus preventing too much of the input value from going to transaction fees.
  • The Lightning Network is a second layer scaling solution built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain.
  • 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.
  • The school also believes that the private sector is best equipped to handle economic activity, and that government intervention only serves to distort markets.
  • 1 TBC is defined as 1,0000 (65,536 decimal) base bitcoin units.

The Block Height is the current number of confirmed Bitcoin blocks. The attack surface of a system is the total number of vulnerabilities that can be exploited by an attacker. In other words, the attack surface is the sum of all the attack vectors. So, if a system has ten potential vulnerabilities, then its attack surface would be ten. 21 Million is the total supply of bitcoin that will ever be mined. Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that are backed by government currencies, like the US dollar or euro.

Hard Fork Combinator

JoinMarket is a decentralized CoinJoin market where users can mix their coins with others to increase privacy and fungibility for both the market makers and takers. The Genesis Block is the first block of bitcoins ever mined. There were 50 bitcoin mined in the Genesis block and they are still in at the same address to this day. 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. The Block Size is the amount of information that is included in a bitcoin block. The Blockchain is the collection of all of the blocks that have ever been mined.

Multi-Coin Wallet

Distributed ledges use nodes, or independent computers, to record, share, synchronize transactions on the electronic ledger. Short for decentralized application, a dApp is an app that isn’t controlled by a central authority. Twitter is an example of a centralized app, with users https://www.tokenexus.com/ relying on it as an intermediary to send and receive messages. A dApp is distributed on a blockchain, allowing users to send and receive data directly without an intermediary. A digital asset that can be used as a store of value or a medium of exchange for goods and services.