A
Altcoin: Term used to refer to cryptocurrencies or blockchain chips alternative to Bitcoin; as Litecoin, Ethereum, Dash, Monero, Zcash, Feathercoin and PPcoin, among others.
Block height: Number of blocks that precede another blockchain platform.
AML: Acronyms for "Anti-Money Laundering", which refer to the legal framework created by the governments of each country to combat money laundering. During the last years the authorities have tried to adapt these policies to the commercial activity of cryptocurrencies.
Leverage: use of borrowed capital, usually by exchange houses, to enhance potential profits. In the cryptocurrency market, leverage rates of 2 to 5 times the investment in exchange houses such as Kraken or Poloniex are achieved.
51% attack: In theory, a computer attack that could be perpetrated by a mining entity or group that owns the majority of the transaction processing of the blockchain network (51% or more) to prevent new transactions from being confirmed.
ASIC: The Integrated Application Specific Circuit (ASIC) is a chip designed to fulfill a specific task. In the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, it is used to solve hashing problems and thus generate new cryptocurrencies, which is known as "cryptocurrency mining.
B
Bitcoin (with a capital B): It is used to describe the concept of Bitcoin, the entire blockchain network that supports the cryptocurrency and the protocol that is executed on it.
bitcoin (with lowercase b): Refers to the cryptocurrency unit based on the homonymous blockchain network, which can be used in singular and plural (bitcoin and bitcoins). It is abbreviated as BTC, and sometimes as XBT, although the latter has progressively fallen into disuse.
Bitcoin Investment Trust: Financial investment fund whose capital assets are based on the cryptocurrency of the Bitcoin network.
Bitcoin Market Potential Index (BMPI for its acronym in English): Statistical indicator of more than 40 variables that classifies 178 countries according to their respective Bitcoin adoption potential as cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin Whitepaper: document that describes the Bitcoin technology in detail and with which the fundamentals of this one were established as payment method. It was written by 'Satoshi Nakamoto' and was published in 2008.
BitPay: Payment processor with bitcoins. It allows merchants to accept bitcoins as a form of payment, obtaining at the end of the transaction the cryptocurrency or fiduciary money according to their preference. It also offers bitcoins portfolio services.
BitStamp: Exchange house based in Slovenia that allows users to exchange bitcoins for fiduciary money and other cryptocurrencies.
Blockchain: name that currently receives Bitcoin technology and its bifurcations, but that refers specifically to the sequence of blocks that store information and that have been verified by the users of the network since its inception. The term blockchain (whose literal translation is "chain of blocks") comes from the fact that each block contains a hash pointer to its predecessor block, creating an interconnected network. It is important to note that there is a company called Blockchain and whose main product is a block explorer that has the same name.
Genesis block: Name given to the first block created and verified from the blockchain of a cryptocurrency.
Orphaned block: Information block that is not part of the distributed network. It is created when two or more miners produce blocks at almost the same time but one of them is propagated by the network faster and accepted by the nodes, leaving the others out of the chain.
Reward block: benefit that a miner gets by successfully solving a hash puzzle and creating a block. The Bitcoin network currently grants 12.5 bitcoins for each block undermined. This reward is reduced by half when a certain number of blocks has been extracted. In the case of Bitcoin, the change occurs every 210,000 blocks.
BTC: abbreviation to refer to the units of bitcoins.
Buttonwood: online movement founded by enthusiast Josh Rossi, which promotes the public and free exchange of bitcoins for dollars. It is named after the Buttonwood agreement, which was a fundamental agreement for the New York Stock Exchange in 1792.
C
Cryptocurrency ATM: Cryptocurrency ATM. It is a device that allows you to exchange cryptocurrencies for fiduciary money in cash and vice versa.
Portfolio: Software application and interface that allows access to the blockchain address where a certain number of cryptocurrencies are stored.
Cold portfolio: Physical device (hardware) that does not have an internet connection and stores a certain amount of cryptocurrencies inside it. They are often used to increase storage security.
