New to Bitcoin? This glossary is designed as a reference to come back to throughout this Knowledge Base - a quick, plain-English definition for every term you're likely to run into, grouped by topic rather than buried in a single alphabetical list. Where a term has its own dedicated article, we've linked straight to it.
The basics
- Bitcoin: digital money with a fixed supply of 21 million coins, run by a global network rather than any bank or government. What is Bitcoin?
- Cryptocurrency: a broad category of thousands of digital tokens, of which Bitcoin is one, and the original. Is Bitcoin the same as cryptocurrency?
- Blockchain: the shared, public record of every Bitcoin transaction ever made, copied across thousands of computers worldwide. How does Bitcoin actually work?
- Node: a computer running Bitcoin's software, independently checking every transaction and block against the network's rules.
- Decentralisation: the principle that no single person, company or government controls Bitcoin. Who controls Bitcoin?
- Satoshi: the smallest unit of Bitcoin - one hundred millionth of a single coin.
Holding and storing Bitcoin
- Wallet: software or a device that manages the keys proving your ownership of Bitcoin - it doesn't actually “hold” coins itself. What is a Bitcoin wallet?
- Private key: a secret code that proves ownership and allows Bitcoin to be spent - never to be shared with anyone.
- Public key / address: the safe-to-share code used to receive Bitcoin, mathematically derived from your private key.
- Seed phrase: a set of ordinary words that can restore full access to your wallet if a device is lost.
- Self-custody: holding and securing your own Bitcoin keys, rather than trusting an exchange or company to do it for you. How do people store Bitcoin?
- Hot wallet / cold storage: a hot wallet stays connected to the internet for convenience; cold storage keeps keys offline for greater security.
- Multisig: a security setup requiring more than one key to approve a transaction, removing any single point of failure.
- Exchange: a platform where Bitcoin can be bought, sold, and sometimes stored on your behalf.
Money, markets and investing basics
- Store of value: an asset expected to hold its worth over long periods, rather than losing value to inflation. Why is Bitcoin sometimes called “digital gold”?
- Volatility: how sharply and how often an asset's price moves. Why does Bitcoin's price move so much?
- Inflation: the rate at which prices rise over time, eroding the purchasing power of cash. What is inflation?
- Fiat currency: government-issued money, like pounds or dollars, not backed by a fixed physical or digital supply.
- Public company / listed: a business whose shares can be bought and sold by the public on a stock exchange. What is a public company?
- Ticker: the short code identifying a company's shares on an exchange - SWC, for Smarter Web.
- Share / shareholder: a unit of company ownership, and the person who holds it.
- ISA / SIPP: UK tax-advantaged accounts for holding investments - an Individual Savings Account and a Self-Invested Personal Pension. How share dealing works in the UK
- Market order / limit order: a market order buys or sells immediately at the current price; a limit order only executes at a price you set.
Bitcoin treasury company terms
- Bitcoin treasury company: a publicly listed company that holds Bitcoin as a core balance sheet asset. What is a Bitcoin treasury company?
- Bitcoin per share: a company's total Bitcoin holdings divided by its shares in issue - the figure that matters more than total Bitcoin held. What does Bitcoin per share mean?
- Accretive / dilutive: a strategy is accretive if it grows Bitcoin per share, and dilutive if it shrinks it. What is an “accretive” Bitcoin strategy?
- NAV (Net Asset Value): the value of everything a company owns, minus what it owes, often expressed per share. What is NAV?
- Premium / discount to NAV: when a share price trades above (premium) or below (discount) its NAV per share.
- Preferred share: a class of share usually offering a fixed dividend, but without the voting rights or growth potential of ordinary shares. What is a preferred share?
- Yield / “Bitcoin Yield”: traditional yield is a cash payment; “Bitcoin Yield” is a separate metric measuring Bitcoin-per-share growth, not a payment at all. Understanding yield and Bitcoin yield
- Amplified / leveraged exposure: when debt or similar instruments make a company's share price move by more than Bitcoin's own price, in both directions. What is “amplified Bitcoin”?
Bitcoin's technical side
- Mining: the process of verifying transactions and creating new Bitcoin by solving a computational puzzle. What is Bitcoin mining?
- Halving: a scheduled event, roughly every four years, that cuts the reward miners receive in half. What happens when Bitcoin “halves”?
- 51% attack: a theoretical scenario where a single miner controlling most of the network's power could attempt limited manipulation - considered practically infeasible at Bitcoin's scale.
Next in knowledge base
New to all of this? Start with What Is Bitcoin?, the first article in this series, and use this glossary as your reference as you work through the rest.
Back to top
