Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Dictionary

Airdrop

An airdrop is a way to distribute coins. End users can generally get coins for free or in exchange for a small task, such as subscribing to a newsletter, sending a tweet or inviting other people via a personal affiliate link.  

Smart Contract

A smart contract is a computer program or a transaction protocol respectively, which is intended to automatically execute, control or document respectively legally relevant events and actions according to the terms of a contract, of an agreement or of a negotiation.

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).

Altcoin

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

Block Reward

The block reward is the payment that is offered to the node that is securing the blockchain. In the case of Bitcoin, which is has a Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm, these would be the miners. The payment is in the form of the native cryptocurrency of that blockchain. The amount is a predetermined reward per block, but often that is supplemented with the fees that are paid for the transactions that block contains. For Bitcoin the current block rewards are cut in half every four years. This is called the ‘halvening’.