Glossary Bitcoin

Bitcoin Vocabulary

A private blockchain requires a verification process for new participants. A private blockchain may also limit which individuals are able to participate in consensus of the blockchain network. A hardware wallet is a physical device that is used to store cryptographic keys, and generally, sign transactions. ‘Forking’ is a term that comes from the world of collaborative software development, and refers to the action of copying an existing application or set of code and modifying it to create an alternate version.

RBF (Replace by Fee)

A web wallet is an online wallet that stores your bitcoin on the cloud or under the custody of a third party custodian such as a bitcoin exchange. Raspberry Pi is a small computer approximately the size of a credit card that is commonly used to run bitcoin nodes. Mt. Gox was one of the Bitcoin Vocabulary first bitcoin exchanges and one of the only places that you could trade bitcoin in the early days of Bitcoin. One of the famous days in bitcoin was when Mt. Gox was hacked resulting in the loss of 850,000 bitcoins. To this day, it remains one of the largest hacks in Bitcoin history.

Blockchain Mutual Credit

  • The Block Time is the time that it takes for a new block to be mined.
  • Even though this prefix is originally Greek, our current usage comes from cryptography.
  • A blockchain or distributed ledger that has a closed network wherein participants are controlled by a single entity.
  • However, at times a block would be mined just after, and in competition with, the last block.
  • The computational process involved in committing a series of transactions into a block on the network, known as ‘hashing a block’, is technically quite simple, and therefore subject to attack.
  • The attack surface of a system is the total number of vulnerabilities that can be exploited by an attacker.

Mining is the act of creating valid Bitcoin blocks, which requires demonstrating proof of work, and miners are devices that mine or people who own those devices. Denominations of Bitcoin value, usually measured in fractions of a bitcoin but sometimes measured in multiples of a satoshi. An ECDSA public https://www.tokenexus.com/ key that is 33 bytes long rather than the 65 bytes of an uncompressed public key. A type of variable-length integer commonly used in the Bitcoin P2P protocol and Bitcoin serialized data structures. An 80-byte header belonging to a single block which is hashed repeatedly to create proof of work.

Bitcoin Vocabulary

Maker Protocol (MakerDAO)

The reward given to a miner or validator after it has successfully hashed a transaction block. The composition depends on the policy used by the cryptocurrency in question, and whether all of the coins have already been successfully mined. The current block reward for the Bitcoin network is 12.5 bitcoins per block. KeyEvery address created to facilitate cryptocurrency transactions comprises a public/private key pair.A public key and address are one and the same; they are used to receive cryptocurrency. The corresponding private key (mathematically linked to the public key/address) is used to spend/transfer cryptocurrency. Transactions are cryptographically secured and become legitimate as soon as they are included into the block.

A type of cyber-attack in which the perpetrator continuously overwhelms the system with requests in order to prevent service of legitimate requests. A digital commodity that is scarce, electronically transferable, and intangible with a market value. The transfer of authority and responsibility from a centralized organization, government, or party to a distributed network. A blanket term used to refer to ensuring crypto projects conform with applicable regulations and laws. Bytecode is a “low-level” computer language, that is, meant to be processed by a computer, rather than a “high-level”, more human-readable, language. In Ethereum, higher-level Solidity is compiled into Ethereum bytecode, which is read by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

Bitcoin Vocabulary

Transaction Triggers

  • A Double Spend takes places whenever the same unit of money is spent more than once.
  • Mining is a specialized and competitive market where the rewards are divided up according to how much calculation is done.
  • A public and private keypair that gives you access to, and control over, the tokens held under a specific address.
  • The ECDSA function used to create a public key from a private key.

Bitcoin Dominance is a metric used to define the share of Bitcoin’s market cap compared to the rest of the crypto market. Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) are formal documents that propose changes, enhancements, or additions to the Bitcoin protocol or related processes. Batching is the process of grouping multiple transactions together.

Zero Confirmation/Unconfirmed Transaction

In the case of Bitcoin, the network is built in such a way that each user is broadcasting the transactions of other users. The hash rate is the measuring unit of the processing power of the Bitcoin network. The Bitcoin network must make intensive mathematical operations for security purposes. When the network reached a hash rate of 10 Th/s, it meant it could make 10 trillion calculations per second. Bitcoin – with capitalization, is used when describing the concept of Bitcoin, or the entire network itself.

Physical Bitcoins

  • In computer security, an attack surface of a system is the totality of ways in which an adversary can attempt to compromise security.
  • A Layer 2 network, or L2, is a blockchain that is built specifically to scale another network.
  • Conversely, “off-ramp” refers to exchanging on-chain assets for their value in a given fiat currency.
  • Block reward refers to the new bitcoins given to miners for validating a new block on the blockchain.
  • While they often contain agreements or sets of actions between parties that emulate a traditional legal contract, they are not, in and of themselves, legal documents.

If you have a tiny amount of bitcoin that you are unable to send from an address, it is considered dust. Divisibility is how easy it is to break up something into smaller pieces. Each bitcoin is divisible into 100,000,000 smaller units called Satoshis. The result of a deflationary currency is usually a decrease in prices for goods and services priced in that currency.

Bitcoin Vocabulary

The number of blocks preceding a particular block on a block chain. For example, the genesis block has a height of zero because zero block preceded it. The ability of someone controlling a majority of network hash rate to revise transaction history and prevent new transactions from confirming. With time and the ever-evolving crypto space, I am sure that many new terms will come up. Hence, I will keep updating this list of cryptocurrency terms regularly on CoinSutra.

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