Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Dictionary

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.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

DAO is an abbreviation of ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organization’. This is basically an organisation that runs automatically on itself without any human interventions. The work is automatically excecuted through Smart contracts.

51% Attack

A ‘51% attack’ refers to a possible attack on a blockchain by a group of ‘miners’, who hold more than 50% of the hashrate. In such a situation the ‘miners’ have the possibility to deliberately not confirm transactions or to issue transactions twice (double-spend).

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.

Anti-Money Laundering

AML is the abbreviation for ‘anti-money laundering’. AML stands for policy and legislation on money laundering. This prevents illegally acquired funds from being converted into a legal variant. Within the crypto world, it is no longer unusual for AML techniques to be used by exchanges and wallets. This term is often used as AML/KYC, where KYC stands for ‘Know your customer’.

Altcoin

An altcoin is any cryptocurrency or token created after the Bitcoin was developed.