Vocab references (Terminology)

ASIC – Application Specific Integrated Circuit, this a device (piece of hardware) specifically designed to mine (facilitate transactions) on a Blockchain network.

Block – An encrypted chunk of ones and zeros that represent X amount of crypto coins on a network.

Blockchain – A stringed together chunk of blocks of encrypted ones and zeros that represent the total amount of crypto coins on a network.

Crypto – Short for cryptography where a string of ones and zeros are secured using mathematical processes.

Crypto exchange – An exchange online where people can go to trade real world currency with other crypto currencies and where one crypto currency can be traded for another crypto currency.

Hashing/Hashes/Hash rate – This is the speed at which a miner’s hardware can help process transactions on a Blockchain’s network each second, there are hashes (h/s), mega hashes (mh/s), gigahashes (gh/s) and terrahashes (th/s).
The more hashes a miners hardware can manage means the more guesses a miner has at finding the answer to a puzzle (to decrypt a hash) for a reward. This in turn encrypts new transactions on the Blockchain with the old transactions and keeps the Blockchain up to date.

Kardashev scale – The measurement of a species capability in harnessing power and the species level of technology.

Mining/Miners – The facilitators of a Blockchain that encrypt the transactions of a Blockchain between one wallet and another that are rewarded with new coins that are created on the Blockchain.

Pool – A group of Blockchain miners that share a portion of the new jobs created on a Blockchain network as to facilitate the transactions on the network.

Schism – A duplication of a Blockchain as to alleviate the miners’ workloads for small transactions on a Blockchain network. For example when Bitcoin (BTC) duplicated and created Bitcash (BCH). Example: Buying a cup of coffee with BTC was taking ages to process by the miners as the transaction value was so low and the rewards to the miners was in turn very low so BCH was created to provide faster transaction times as to buy the cup of coffee.

SHA256 – This stands for Secure Hash Algorithm, it was created by the NSA back in 2002 and is a hash of 256bits, miners of networks like Bitcoin decrypt the hashes on a Blockchain as to validate blocks to receive new coins on the network.

Shares – The shares of a block being mined by the miners (facilitators) of the Blockchain which accept new jobs (transactions) on the network as to encrypt them and to add them to the Blockchain as a whole.

Wallet – The place where crypto coins are stored which comes in the form of an address that has been secured on a Blockchain network.

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