Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Dictionary

Blockchain

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

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.

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’.

Ethereum

Launched in 2015, Ethereum is the world's programmable blockchain. Like other blockchains, Ethereum has a native cryptocurrency called Ether (ETH). ETH is digital money. People all over the world use ETH to make payments, as a store of value, or as collateral. But unlike other blockchains, Ethereum can do much more.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a digital or virtual cryptocurrency created in 2009 that uses peer-to-peer technology to facilitate instant payments.

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.