crypto 101 | The Glossary

giphy

My first contact with the crypto community was by the Telegram groups. First times, I was feeling like an alien.. Understanding a sentence was like solving another language. “LET’S HODL!”, “I’M GOING LONG”, “WHEN LAMBO?” what were they telling? The memes, the gifs, graphs, I was like in another planet. Then one by one, searching and seeking it took me a short time to speak the same language with the community. And the community became something really valuable to me, it is one of the most important aspect that I love about crypto. The community is so energetic, eager to learn, eager to help, fun.. the memes, the gifs, the collectiveness.

Ohh.. It was a pretty long introduction, let me kick off the list. I hope you’ll enjoy your time with the crypto community. Here’s the must-know, intro level phrases to speak the crypto language ELI5!

• ELI5: Not especially a crypto word, but it’s better to know it. “Explain like I’m 5”.
• hodl: You will see this word a LOT, “hold” is the origin of the word. Crypto is a volatile market and try to avoid the panic sell and just hodl.

the origin of “hodl”

• FOMO: “Fear of Missing Out” the emotion you feel when you see a huge green candle, the emotion you feel when you see +%120 coins in the market.
• FUD: “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt” the emotion you feel when you see a huge red candle goin down, the emotion you feel when you see -%30 coins in the market. The feeling that you wanna sell really bad.
• Moon: A great rise in price, to the moon!

ex: a guy with fomo trying to chase a pump when he sees that the coin is going to the moon

• Pump: Rapid upward movement of the price with a big volume. (Most of the time a play from whales or an institution)
• Dump: Rapid downward movement of the price with a big volume. (Most of the time a play from whales or an institution)
• Whale: someone with lots of coins
• Fish: someone with small amount of coins
• Pump&Dump (P&D) : whales/groups moving the markets up and down

a random example of pump and dump in a low-cap coin in cryptopia

• ATH: “All Time High”
• BT(F)D: “Buy the (Fuckin’) Dip”
• DYOR: “Do Your Own Research” Don’t be a sheep!
• FA: “Fundamental Analysis”, it’s simply the news, events and project.
• TA: “Technical Analysis” it’s simply the chart/data analysis .
• MCAP: “Market capitalization” = price × circulating supply (Quite different in crypto than the stocks.)
• lowcap/midcap/highcap coins: coins with low/mid/high market caps according to your scale.

coinmarketcap.com — one of the most useful websites in crypto to monitor the price and mcap

• FIAT: Government money (USD, EUR, etc.)
• Exchange: The platform where you trade cryptocurrency
• Altcoin: “Alternative coin”, everything except btc right now.
• Rekt: When someone lost a lot of money from a trade.
• Bag: Portfolio.
• Bagholder: You buy a coin/token, it’s price decreases. Then, you don’t wanna sell and now you are a bagholder.
• Bullish: Expection of upward movement, the greens.
• Bearish: Expection of downward movement, the reds.

image from avantfx.com

• Long: A buy position for selling cheaper.
• Short: A sell position for buying lower.
• Margin Trading: Simply, trading with a borrowed money, you lend money from the exchanges and create long or short positio contracts with the lended money, that’s a margin trade.
• Limit Order: “A stop-limit order is an order to place a regular buy or sell order (also known as a “limit order”) when the highest bid or lowest ask reaches a specified price, known as the “stop.” (from poloniex.com)
• ICO: “Initial Coin Offering”, like an IPO, fund raise.
• Shilling: Promoting.
• Mining: like mining gold, instead of swinging your axe, your computer solves some problems.
• lambo: the car that we buy when we have a succesful trade, the ultimate goal in the crypto community.

lot’s of memes

• Faucet: they give free satoshis.
• sats/satoshi: 1 Satoshi=0.00000001 BTC.
• Satoshi: Father of Bitcoin.
• Vitalik: The guy who decided to found etc while playing WOW.

about.me/vitalik_buterin

• Arbitrage: Enjoying the price difference between exchanges.
• Panic Sell: Selling in a panic when you see a red candle.
• Weak Hands: People sells with a panic in FUD, the first group of sellers.
• Price Wall: a limit order accumulation at a specific price.

An example of a price wall

• Fork: A divergence / an update on blockchain. (may be irreversible, a hardfork — may be reversible, soft fork)
• Shitcoin: A shitty coin.
• Whitepaper: A document which describes the project.
• Maker: Someone puts orders in the orderbook. Makes liquidity.
• Taker: Someonedirectly buys or sell from the orders in the orderbook. Takes liquidity.

Thanks for reading, I hope it was helpful. I’ll be updating this post and adding new words.

And finally, you can follow me on Twitter -> @cryptorocket_