So I had my parents over to the house the other day - and I was showing my
dad my frankenstein immersion cooling project that I had been tinkering with.
He was like “Oh is this for your bitcoins?” And internally I was trying to decide like what
echelon of an explanation to make an attempt at - my dad is in his seventies,
and even though he WAS a network engineer during the early days of computers, he…
well he has not kept up with the many intricacies of the blockchain, ill just leave it there.
I decided to go for it - so I said well no, this computer is mining
Ether. And he said “huh?” And I said, ethereum, its a cryptocurrency - “huh?”
Its a… its like bitcoin but really its not much like bitcoin at all…
“its a type of bitcoin?”
Heavy sigh. “yes, its a type of bitcoin.”
My dad is a huge supporter of my projects and he watches my videos
(hi Dad). But he’s either watching with the sound off, or literally just doesnt
understand anything Im saying wether Im talking about the upcoming ‘Ethereum 2 merge’ or the
increasing global block difficulty despite China taking so much hash power offline.. Theres no way
he’s following along with “my bullish outlook when it comes to the upcoming halving” or why
I might be planning a trip to the moon! Im completely sure Im not alone in this.
There is a whole generation of Boomer parents who dont know they can just ask their phone a
question outloud or that what they’re reading on facebook might actually not be real!
So this video shall serve as a commonly used crypto Related words - explainer. And it will
be incomplete - particularly if you ever go on reddit and try to look into anything.
These are in the order that they come to me,
and really half of them could be the subject of their own video, but I think I can help at
least give people a basic understanding for reading the internet about cryptocurrencies.
Lets start with some Acronyms that may trip you up initially in peoples responses on the online.
DYOR (Do Your Own Research) - a lot of times when someone posts a basic question in a forum on the
internet, people will jump all over them telling them to Do Your Own Research - seemingly oblivious
to the fact that the person is no doubt doing some level of research in asking the question.
DD (Due Diligence) Similar to DYOR, when someone is telling you to do DD,
they’re telling you to make sure you look deeply into whatever thing youre
about to spend money on. It typically follows advice someone just gave,
“Its looking like Tesla has another 3x in them in the short term based on the supply chain problem,
but do your own DD.” That is to say, dont blame me because I made up what I said!
DCA (Dollar Cost Average). You will hear the advice to “DCA in” or dollar
cost average into an investment rather than just dumping all your money in at once. It
simply means to systematically invest equal amounts, spaced out over regular intervals,
regardless of price. That follows the old adage that “Time in the market beats timing the market.”
2FA (Two Factor Authentication) I dont know why age has anything to do with it,
but old people tend not to use very good security with their online accounts. The
password “Password!” is not a good password. Two Factor Authentication is a method websites
and apps and exchanges will use to make sure you are you. So even after you put in your password,
you still have to look on your phone or watch and ok something or type in another
usually 6 digit number that site will send to you (or whoever stole your phone) in order to sign in.
Wen Lambo? If someone is asking ‘when lambo’ about a particular cryptocurrency,
they’re asking when their investment will net them enough profits to buy a lamborghini. This
is a result of some shitcoins very suddenly going up 1000% and making people rich overnight. Well,
unless they hold, because those same coins will usually dump right after.
DUMP; when a coin dumps, it means that either a huge majority of holders sell suddenly, or
one person who holds a huge amount of it sells his coins, causing a cascade of everyone else selling,
and the price rapidly dropping faster than you can sign in.
Speaking of a Bag Holder. A bag holder is someone who bought early enough to watch
their investment skyrocket, or someone who bought at the peak - but refused to ever
sell for profit, and so they left holding “the bag” full of worthless currency when it dumps.
Whale; a whale is a wealthy person, or organization controlled by an investor
who can single handedly cause the price of a particular cryptocurrency to change - either
by buying or selling such a large amount that it literally just changes the value due to
supply and demand - or by having SO MUCH CLOUT that the mere mention of
a project can send enough people rushing in to buy it that the price will change.
To Hold, often spelled to HODL. Is the practice of not selling your coins.
HODL first appeared in 2013 as “Hold On for Dear Life” when user Gamekyuubi held through that
years price collapse in order to realize enormous gains. I dont personally love when I hear people
speak it outloud that way - totally a personal preference, not telling you how to live your life.
Diamond Hands! is the practice of holding NO MATTER WHAT - when your belief in the
project is so strong that you squeeze your crypto tokens SO HARD that your hands turn into diamonds.
Paper Hands on the other hand is the practice of taking profits by selling your coins - and
for some reason is used as a derogatory slur even though almost everyone is in it to make money..
FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. If youre not an avid investor,
it might come as a surprise that there are whole teams of people deployed in the crypto
markets as well as in the stock markets, to make comments all over, to write articles
and social media posts specifically with the intention of causing doubt in retail investors
and therefor moving the price downward when people sell out of their position.
This is done so that larger investors can buy in at a lower price and its actually quite common!
A Fudster is someone who is identified as spreading FUD,
often lying about a project or taking something true wildly out of context to make it scary.
Market Cap (market capitalization refers to the total dollar market value of all coins
available for a particular cryptocurrency. The price of bitcoin changes constantly so
the MOMENT I say this outloud it will be out of date, but Bitcoin currently has
18,868,506 coins in circulation - and each one costs 66,000 dollars, so their market
cap is $1,259,874,136,049 one point two trillion! (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/)
Altcoin, and alt coin is simply anything thats not bitcoin. Probably the most popular is Ethereum.
Sh*t coin - A sh*tcoin is a cryptocurrency with little to no value or a digital currency that has
no immediate, discernible purpose. HOWEVER, every once in a while, when the whole world
comes together - even a project that started as a joke, as a meme, can gain enough investors to
create millionaires out of nowhere. But in general, its risky to invest in sh*tcoins.
Sometimes you’ll hear about a coin “GOING TO THE MOON” - this one is fairly obvious,
but when its written instead that “Ethereum is going to moon after the hard fork,” I can
see it throwing my dad off its meaning. To moon simply means metaphorically that
your blockchain token of choice has found its way onto a rocket ship,
and its price is about to blast off so high that it will travel into space.
I feel like this massively oversimplifies most aspects of orbital mechanics and space travel
with respect to altitude, you dont just go straight to the moon, you’ve got to orbit
the earth at just the right time and speed… - but I cant argue that the moon is… really high.
The Blockchain - is a ledger of all the transactions that have ever taken place within
that system. For bitcoin, as new transactions take place - peer to peer computers that are
connected all over the world will validate those transactions and every ten minutes,
a new block is created. That block is connected to the previous block
to form a chain that can never be edited or deleted forever and ever because every
bitcoin miner around the world has a complete copy, and the network reaches
a consensus of the data so that no one entity controls it. It is therefore - decentralized.
Decentralization refers to the fact that no one entity controls the price or transactions of a
crypto currency on the blockchain. Unlike a government currency like the US Dollar,
no one can just MAKE trillions more, potentially devaluing all existing dollars,
like they can with paper money, often referred to as FAIT currency.
Mining - Mining is super hard to simplify - basically because like, what is a calculator
doing when you put in 28*87? Who the hell knows, but it spits out a correct answer.
Everyone is running specialized ASIC computers trying to “solve a block” using a nonce and a
bunch of hashes. Crypto Miners are racing to solve some complex algorithm to be the first to complete
a cryptographic puzzle to win the prize of writing the next block on the blockchain,
and with it receive a reward in that currency. What I can bring into perspective is that
Bitcoin mining computer speed is measured in the TeraHash per second - thats TRILLIONS of attempts
at solving the riddle per second. A trillion is a number people have a hard time conceptualizing,
but I can help - if you got a job and you were paid ONE THOUSAND dollars an hour,
24 hours a day! It would take 114,155 YEARS to make a trillion dollars.
NFT - a non fungible token. An example of a fungible token is a Bitcoin! Each coin
will always have the same value as any other coin. NFTs, however are all unique, and their
ownership data and transaction history live securely on the blockchain. So when you see
an NFT of a picture or a 3D asset in a computer - the NFT portion is a digital identification, not
the actual art - it just points to and explains ownership of the art. The reason they are so good
for art is because the blockchain is immutable, it can not be edited. So the providence, the
history of ownership and origin of a piece of art cant be faked, and can easily be
tracked down for authentication. Art valuation WITHOUT NFTs, like the traditional art trade
is practically an art itself, discerning wether a work is even real, or who has owned it in
the past - a lot of it is just made up and controlled by a number of gatekeeping groups!
NFTs can be used MUCH more widely than just art, also - you can set up to show ownership
of basically anything - a deed to your house could exist as an NFT and it would be
traceable, unforgeable - not that forging deeds to houses is a common thing to worry about,
but the process of selling it would be way easier!
Crypto Words and Acronyms. Part one of… maybe one, maybe 11 - who knows, Im in Miami now and
I have art world things to do - comment with more crypto words, I should do a mining one.