crypto 101 | The Glossary
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.
- 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!
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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_