Vocabulary

• Barter – A system of exchange where goods or services are directly exchanged for other goods or services without using a medium of exchange, such as money.
• Money – A current medium of exchange in the form of coins and banknotes; assets, property, and resources owned by someone or something; wealth.
• Commodity Money – A type of money whose value comes from a commodity out of which it is made.
• Fiat Money – Currency that a government has declared to be legal tender, but it is not backed by a physical commodity.
• Gold Standard – A monetary system where a country's currency or paper money has a value directly linked to gold.
• Banknote – A type of negotiable instrument known as a promissory note, made by a bank, payable to the bearer on demand.
• Coin – A piece of hard material, traditionally metal and usually in the shape of a disc, which is used as a form of money.
• Central Bank – A financial institution given privileged control over the production and distribution of money and credit for a nation or a group of nations.
• Credit – The trust which allows one party to provide money or resources to another party wherein the second party does not reimburse the first party immediately, but promises either to repay or return those resources at a later date.
• Debit – An accounting entry which results in either an increase in assets or a decrease in liabilities on a company's balance sheet.
• Inflation – The rate at which the general level of prices for goods and services is rising, and subsequently, purchasing power is falling.
• Deflation – The reduction of the general level of prices in an economy.
• Interest Rate – The proportion of a loan that is charged as interest to the borrower, typically expressed as an annual percentage of the loan outstanding.
• Loan – A thing that is borrowed, especially a sum of money that is expected to be paid back with interest.
• Stock – A type of security that signifies ownership in a corporation and represents a claim on part of the corporation's assets and earnings.
• Bond – A fixed income instrument that represents a loan made by an investor to a borrower.
• Dividend – A payment made by a corporation to its shareholders, usually in the form of cash or additional shares.
• Investment – The action or process of investing money for profit.
• Portfolio – A range of investments held by a person or organization.
• Capital – Wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organization or available for a purpose such as starting a company or investing.
• Asset – A resource with economic value that an individual, corporation or country owns or controls with the expectation that it will provide a future benefit.
• Liability – The state of being responsible for something, especially by law; a thing for which someone is responsible, especially an amount of money owed.
• Equity – The value of the shares issued by a company.
• Forex – The foreign exchange market, which is a global decentralized or over-the-counter market for the trading of currencies.
• Cryptocurrency – A digital or virtual currency that uses cryptography for security.
• Blockchain – A system in which a record of transactions made in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency are maintained across several computers that are linked in a peer-to-peer network.
• Bitcoin – A type of digital currency in which encryption techniques are used to regulate the generation of units of currency and verify the transfer of funds, operating independently of a central bank.
• Altcoin – Any digital cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin. The term is said to stand for “alternative to Bitcoin”.
• Wallet – A software application that allows the user to store, retrieve and conduct transactions with digital currency.
• Mining – The process by which new units of cryptocurrency are released and transactions are added to the blockchain ledger.
• Blockchain Ledger – A distributed database that maintains a continuously-growing list of records called blocks.
• Satoshi – The smallest unit of the bitcoin cryptocurrency.
• ICO (Initial Coin Offering) – An unregulated means by which funds are raised for a new cryptocurrency venture.
• Token – A digital asset used in a blockchain.
• Liquidity – The degree to which an asset or security can be quickly bought or sold in the market without affecting the asset's price.
• Volatility – Statistical measure of the dispersion of returns for a given security or market index.
• Bull Market – A market in which share prices are rising, encouraging buying.
• Bear Market – A market in which prices are falling, encouraging selling.
• White Paper – An authoritative report or guide that informs readers concisely about a complex issue and presents the issuing body's philosophy on the matter.
• Decentralization – The process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning and decision making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group.
• Smart Contract – A computer protocol intended to digitally facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract.
• Peer-to-Peer Network – A decentralized communications model in which each party has the same capabilities and either party can initiate a communication session.
• Public-Key Cryptography – A cryptographic system that uses two keys -- a public key known to everyone and a private key known only to the recipient of the message.
• Private Key – A secret key that is used in data encryption and decryption. It is typically used with a public key encryption scheme.
• Hash Function – A function that converts an input into a fixed size string of bytes, typically a hash code or hash digest.
• Proof-of-Work – A system that ties mining capability to computational power. Blocks must be hashed, which is in itself an easy computational process.
• Proof-of-Stake – A type of algorithm by which a cryptocurrency blockchain network aims to achieve distributed consensus.
• Hard Fork – A type of protocol upgrade that is not backward compatible.
• Soft Fork – A change to the software protocol where only previously valid blocks/transactions are made invalid.
• Market Capitalization – The total value of all a company's shares of stock. It is calculated by multiplying the price of a stock by its total number of outstanding shares.