A Bit of Glossing Over
Adventures in VeVe #10
When I first started researching the blockchain before the pandemic, it wasn’t long before I got really lost in the jargon. I am the sort of person who learns best by demonstrations rather than written words, so YouTube quickly became a good resource for me. Fortunately, there was That One Guy with the calm voice and funny intros who did a series of hand-holding videos, and finally I got it.
NFTs, on the other hand, took me a bit longer to figure out… more on that next time; right now I want to talk about the jargon both in VeVe and beyond. I’ve always been a bit behind when it comes to what the kids are saying these days, and when I tried to translate the jargon using word clues in the rest of the sentence, I found out that my version of what those words meant was absolutely, positively, wrong!
Or are they?
I will let you be the judge of that.
Here are my personal definitions of some of the jargon. And yes, I know some terms were borrowed from other media sources and games, but they’re still prevalently used when talking about digital collectibles.
Airdrop: Freebies that make us hold stuff even when we don’t like it.
Alpha: That thing we always accuse influencers of having, even when they don’t, in hopes of finding out something we’re not supposed to know yet.
Burn: Destroying stuff to make less stuff, typically after someone made too much stuff; often occurs daily. You know… like H&M does to clothing.
Cap: Head covering that the vast majority of all YouTubers seem to wear while doing NFT videos.
Degen: One of many self-deprecating terms that crypto people use to describe themselves.
Diamond Hands: Holding on to an asset forever. Maybe even longer than a whole year!
Doxxed: A show of papers proving that the team behind a project are who they say they are and may or may not be fake.
Flip: The thing that Other People do to make money but makes the rest of us lose it.
Floor: The lowest price for an item, which is always higher than what you want to buy it at and lower than what you want to sell it at.
Fomo: Freak-Out Mad Overspending, typically for something you probably didn’t really want in the first place.
Fud: Full Unadulterated Destruction, often caused by not enough people doing their homework and too many people that want to take advantage of that fact.
Gas: The root of all evil.
Gem Squeeze: People selling things they wanted last week because they didn’t know what was happening this week.
Interoperable: How in the hell would I know what it is? I’m on VeVe.
KYC: A show of papers proving an individual is who they say they are and may or may not be fake.
MCP: A way to prove to a wide audience that I am not a whale in any shape or form.
Metaverse: A term that makes very big companies make very big fools of themselves when they Fomo in without knowing what they’re doing.
Minting: Being the first one to own the nice shiny new thing and holding it until you sell it for the next nice shiny new thing.
Moon: That place everyone tries to get to… but I think Alice probably got there first.
OG: The people who need a really cool title on the app to explain why they’ve lost the most in a bear market.
OUP: That thing that makes little red circles periodically fill up on a webpage.
Paper Hands: Those very nice people who are selling me my favorite collectibles at a discount. Thank you.
Phygital: Matching something that doesn’t collect dust with an item that does.
Rugpull: When things that sound too good to be true turn out to be too good to be true.
Sus: What people tend to say when they want to express that something sounds too good to be true.
Sweep: What happens when too many people price an item too low to ignore any longer.
Vault: The place where Guys with Too Much Time on Their Hands make panoramas with digital collectibles. However, it always looks like a garage sale when anyone else does it.
Waitlist: Something that a lot of us are still waiting for. Maybe we need to join a waitlist to get the waitlist.
Wall: Pricing multiples of the same item at a certain price to trap sellers and irritate buyers.
Wen: When without an H. It is what we use to whine about things we want… because if we took the H out of whine, we’d get wine, which would make us forget about whatever it was we were wanting to whine about in the first place. Wen is a much better idea.
Whale: People who have more money than me and make krill out of people who don’t do their homework.
Whitelist: The Fastpass of the NFT world.
Winter: It starts with people shopping for presents, but by the time you get to the end of it, you are totally DONE with the idea of shoveling snow.
*Disclaimer:
Please note that because the terms Cap, Fomo, Fud, and OG are now being used so frequently on CNBC, there is a likelihood of the community being so disgusted by the terms going mainstream that they may be changed without notice. (No cap.)