Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Dictionary

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.

Blockchain

Blockchain is most simply defined as a decentralized, distributed ledger technology that records the provenance of a digital asset.

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’.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a digital or virtual cryptocurrency created in 2009 that uses peer-to-peer technology to facilitate instant payments.

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.