Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Dictionary

Blockchain

Blockchain is most simply defined as a decentralized, distributed ledger technology that records the provenance of a digital asset.

Bounty program

Bounties are simple tasks of jobs by the team behind a coin. These can be as simple as joining a Telegram channel or by (re)tweeting. It could also be a bit more difficult like a translation job for example. The participants receive rewards in the form of coins in exchange for completing these bounties.

Block Reward

The block reward is the payment that is offered to the node that is securing the blockchain. In the case of Bitcoin, which is has a Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm, these would be the miners. The payment is in the form of the native cryptocurrency of that blockchain. The amount is a predetermined reward per block, but often that is supplemented with the fees that are paid for the transactions that block contains. For Bitcoin the current block rewards are cut in half every four years. This is called the ‘halvening’.

Double Spending

With digital currency, there is a risk that the holder could make a copy of the digital token and send it to a merchant or another party while retaining the original.

Anti-Money Laundering

AML is the abbreviation for ‘anti-money laundering’. AML stands for policy and legislation on money laundering. This prevents illegally acquired funds from being converted into a legal variant. Within the crypto world, it is no longer unusual for AML techniques to be used by exchanges and wallets. This term is often used as AML/KYC, where KYC stands for ‘Know your customer’.

Cold Storage

Cold storage refers to storing cryptocurrency on a place where the private key cannot be accessed via the internet. This can be done on a hardware wallet, paper wallet or software wallet in an offline environment.