ATH: Acronym for All Time High (regarding a cryptocurrencies price)

Bear Market: When the markets are falling it is said to be a bear market. This can also be applied to one particular cryptocurrency. Someone can be bullish on one cryptocurrency and bearish on another.

Blockchain: A digital ledger in which transactions made in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency are recorded chronologically and publicly.

Bull Market: When the markets are rising it is said to be a bull market. This can also be applied to one particular cryptocurrency. Someone can be bullish on one cryptocurrency and bearish on another.

Cold Wallet: A wallet that is not connected to the internet. Examples would be paper wallets and hardware wallets.

Cold Storage: When cryptocurrency is put into a “cold wallet” that is not connected to the internet in any way, such as a hardware wallet, it is said to be in cold storage.

Fiat: Legal currency whos value is backed by the government that issued it. This is the type of currency most people are accustomed to. When someone buys bitcoin with fiat they are using their money to buy bitconi. When someone cashes out to fiat they are taking their earnings and depsoting it into their bank account.

FOMO: An acronym for “Fear Of Missing Out”. It relates to trading cryptocurrenies where a person is likely to buy into a currency while it is on an upswing or when there is a lot of hype around it without doing enough research on the project.

Fork: A radical change in the protocol that makes previously invalid blocks/transactions valid (or vice-versa), and as such requires all nodes or users to upugrade to the latest version of the software. Basically it’s kind of like a significant update to the underlaying framework.

FUD: An acronym for “Fear, Uncertainty, and Disinformation”. This is when a person is talking down on a cryptocurrency in order to get people to sell

Hodl: An internet meme that started by somebody misspelling “Hold” (as in to hold a cryptocurrency). It is often used to express ones confidence that a certain coin will increase in value and that they are not selling it any time soon.

Hot Wallet: A cryptocurrency wallet that is in some way connected to the internet, such as on an exchange or online wallet, as opposed to an offline, or “cold wallet”

ICO: Initial Coin Offering. It is a way for a new cryptocurrency to crowdfund before launching.

Limit Order: When trading cryptocurrencies you can set the price at which you wish to buy or sell a cryptocurrency. Someone has to be willing to purchase the cryptocurrency at the price you are buying/selling or else the order will not be filled.

Market Cap: The total number of coins/tokens multiplied by the current price. It is a measurement of the total value invested in the cryptocurrency.

Market Order: Instead of setting a price you can just make a buy/sell at the current market price. This is known as a market order.

Mining: Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin exist on a blockchain. Anybody can set up a “mine” and confirm transactions. In return they are paid in bitcoin that is either created or given to them in transaction fees. This is known as mining.

Moon: When a cryptocurrency’s price is skyrocketting you’ll hear a lot of people say it’s “going to the moon” or “mooning”.

Node: This is a miner that uses the full blockchain and shares blocks across the network.

Private Key: An encrypted key used to acces your bitcoin. Only the owner of the private key has access to that owner’s wallet

Public Key: Public keys are publicly sent with each transaction to confirm that it was the owner that sent it. Public keys and wallet addresses are derived from the private key but they are essentially impossible to reverse engineer to get the private key

ROI: Acronym for Return on Investment and is usually expressed as a percentage.

Satoshis: The smallest unit of measurement for bitcoin that equals one hundred millionth of a bitcoin (0.00000001 BTC). Also called a “sat”.

Segwit: Short for Segregated Witness. This is the name used for a change in the way transactions are confirmed in order to reduce block size.

Tether: USD Tether is a cryptocurrency where each coin is backed by actualy US currency. The exchange rate is typically close to 1:1.

Wallet: A place where cryptocurrency is stored. It contains your private keys which give you access to your coins.

Whale: This refers to a person with enough cryptocurrency to influence the markets. You will usually see big sell walls set up by whales who try to keep the price down so they can buy more of that currency at a lower price before it sky rockets.