Bitcoin

Altcoins refers to all other cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin. As of the fall of 2021, there are over 14,000 cryptocurrencies, and altcoins accounted for nearly 60% of the total cryptocurrency market in November 2021, according to CoinMarketCap.

Proof of work (PoW) is a decentralized verification method that requires members of a network to solve an arbitrary mathematical puzzle to prevent anybody from gaming the system. The consensus practice is used widely in cryptocurrency mining, for validating transactions and mining new tokens.

A Bitcoin whale is someone who has a large holding of Bitcoin to the degree that their actions can have huge ripple effects on the market. The biggest known bitcoin whales are Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of bitcoin, the Winklevoss twins, and venture capitalists like Tim Draper and Barry Silbert.

Satoshi is the smallest unit of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, which is named after Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder or founders of Bitcoin, the anonymous author(s) of a white paper in 2008 that outlined the development of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency and market. The satoshi to bitcoin ratio is 100 million satoshis to one bitcoin.

Satoshi Nakamoto is the anonymous author or authors who wrote the original Bitcoin white paper detailing the concept, and is credited with inventing Bitcoin itself. While several people have claimed to be Satoshi, the true identity of the person known as Satoshi Nakamoto has never been verified nor revealed.

A Bitcoin wallet is a program used for holding and sending Bitcoins or various cryptocurrencies through private keys needed to sign Bitcoin transactions. The most secure Bitcoin wallets are known as hardware wallets, while web wallets are the least secure.

Bitcoin Cash is the cryptocurrency that was formed as a result of a Bitcoin hard fork or split that occurred in August 2017. As the industry and market grew, the new Bitcoin Cash was created to accommodate a larger block size compared to Bitcoin, allowing more transactions into a single block. Bitcoin Cash itself underwent another fork in November 2018 and split into Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin Cash SV (Satoshi Vision). To complicate things further, Bitcoin Cash ABC is referred to as Bitcoin Cash now.