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Tag: hodl

Don’t Let FOMO Get You REKT — Crypto Sayings Explained

Coinbase breaks down 11 of the most popular pieces of crypto lingo.

If you’ve spent any time reading crypto Reddit or Twitter, there’s a 100 percent chance you’ve encountered — and were potentially baffled – by a dense thicket of acronyms, misspelled words, gamer memes, and more. From FOMO and FUD to laser eyes and whales, get crypto-literate with this beginner’s guide to eleven of the most common pieces of slang.

Diamond hands

Or as Elon Musk put it in a May tweet: 💎🙌. Diamond hands is a meme popularized by crypto and stock traders on Reddit. It connotes a hardcore adherence to the HODL philosophy (see below) — and is often used by online groups that have banded together to try to drive up the price of a memecoin or other asset. (The related-but-derogatory term for skittish traders? “Paper hands”/🧻🤲. )

FOMO

Stands  for “fear of missing out” — and is generally most intense when markets are rising fast. FOMO can lead to emotional trading and bad decision making — it’s dangerous because hindsight is 20/20, making it all too easy to regret the gains you would have made if you had only timed all your trades perfectly. (Nobody times all of their trades perfectly.)

A good way to reduce FOMO is to have a strategy and stick to it, especially if you believe that the asset you’re investing in will rise in value over the longer term. One popular option is dollar-cost averaging (or DCA),  in which you invest the same amount every week or month without worrying about what the market is doing.

FUD

Stands for “fear, uncertainty, and doubt.” It’s a classic public relations and propaganda tactic. The idea is to warp public perception about a product, technology, or candidate by strategically releasing misinformation designed to create a negative emotional response.  

Mainframe-computer architect and entrepreneur Gene Amdahl is often credited with popularizing the term in the 1980s. He used it to describe the way IBM salespeople of the era worked to delegitimize competitors’ products, painting them as unreliable and untrustworthy.

In the crypto space, FUD often refers to general skepticism around the technology (from the media or from traditional-finance analysts), but the idea can also be used by proponents of a specific token or protocol in an attempt to disarm criticism. 

What should you do when faced with FUD? Embrace another popular crypto acronym, and DYOR. Do your own research.

The flippening

The flippening is a hypothetical event in which Ethereum’s market cap will one day eclipse Bitcoin’s. It can also be used to describe any similar situation where a smaller or less-established token or protocol  might overtake a larger rival.

HODL

HODL is probably the most prevalent piece of crypto slang. It originally came from a drunken typo in the subject line of a 2013 Bitcoin forum post: “I AM HODLING”. (It should have read “holding.”)  

HODL — usually pronounced “hoddle” — simply means to buy and hold for the long term, no matter what the market is doing. Bitcoin fans have even retroactively turned it into an acronym that stands for “hold on for dear life.” 

The original forum post is riddled with typos, but the underlying message was prescient. At the time, Bitcoin’s value had plummeted from $1242 to $480 in a month. Panicked traders were bailing out, but GameKyuuubi — real name Mike, a programmer — wasn’t selling: “In a zero-sum game such as this,” he wrote, “traders can only take your money if you sell.”

The sentiment soon spread throughout the Bitcoin community and countless memes ensued.  Crypto has experienced multiple bull and bear cycles, but so far at least, HODL has been good advice — with Bitcoin emerging as one of the best-performing assets of the last decade. (As mentioned in the FOMO entry above, one good way to HODL is via DCA.)

Laser eyes

In 2021, avid Bitcoin proponents began signalling their support for the cryptocurrency by adding “laser eyes” to their Twitter photo. NFL superstar Tom Brady, Paris Hilton, Elon Musk, Wyoming senator Cynthia Lummis, and MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor are a few of the famous names who have taken part. The meme is often associated with the hashtag #LaserRayUntil100K — indicating support for the cryptocurrency’s potential to break the $100,000 mark.

Memecoin

Dogecoin (DOGE) is the original memecoin — it’s literally a cryptocurrency based on a meme that was popular around the time it was invented. But in 2021, when Dogecoin dramatically rose in value, a huge wave of other tokens with absurd names emerged (in part made possible by decentralized exchanges like Sushiswap, which allow anyone to easily list a token). In May 2021, Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin donated more than $1 billion in DOGE-inspired memecoins like AKITA, SHIB, and Dogelon Mars (ELON) towards COVID-relief efforts in India and other causes. The coins had been deposited in Buterin’s crypto wallet in an attempt to make traders believe he was an investor.

Moon (or mooning)

When a cryptocurrency is seeing strong upward momentum, traders tend to describe it as going “to the moon” or “mooning.” 

Pump and dump

A coordinated effort to artificially inflate the price of an asset and cash out before it tumbles back to earth. Cryptocurrencies with smaller market caps are particularly vulnerable to pump and dump schemes. A group of traders will work together to drive up the price of a specific small-cap altcoin. As prices rise, the schemers will promote the opportunity on Twitter, Reddit, Discord, Facebook, YouTube comments, and elsewhere, attracting more investors and driving the price up further. When the asset hit their target value, the original group will cash out — taking big profits and leaving everyone else “holding the bag” as the token collapses.

Rekt

What happens if you get swept up by FOMO and end up becoming the victim of a pump and dump? You get rekt. Getting rekt in its original gaming context means to lose badly, and the definition is pretty much the same in crypto.

Whale

The biggest holders of crypto are known as whales. For Bitcoin, anyone with more than 1000 BTC is generally considered a whale. Unlike the vast majority of crypto traders, whales have the potential to move markets with their trades. As of mid-May 2021, the top 100 Bitcoin addresses (out of more than 800,000 active addresses) held more than 20 percent of all BTC according to bitinfocharts.com.

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World’s Largest Digital Ad Seller Google Now Allowing Crypto Wallets

Beginning in August 2021 cryptocurrency wallets will be able to run ads on the massive technology network in the US. Back in March of 2018, Google made headlines when it prohibited crypto advertising from it’s search engine, a decision that came after Facebook commenced a similar policy change earlier that year.

Just last year in 2020, Google’s ad profits amounted to 146.92 billion US dollars. These revenue figures come as no shock, as Google accounts for most of the online and mobile search market globally. As major companies are announcing the acceptance of cryptocurrency or them investing in digital currency, Google is only positioning itself to remain on top in the tech world.

Google has little to no competition in the world digital markets. As cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets are shown by them specifically as being the new money, this is going to create a ripple effect in people having the desire to invest in cryptocurrency and use it regularly.

Amazon.com spends $17.4M on Google Ads and has been ranked as their number 1 client for multiple years. The ecommerce giant has recently denied rumors that it will accept Bitcoin. But, as with all cryptocurrency public refusals, companies tend to have other plans in the background. We just have to simply wait for the big announcement.

Crypto companies will be able to run ads on Google properties such as YouTube, as long as they go through the Google’s certification process.

How To Advertise On On Google As A Cryptocurrency Exchange Or Wallet

To be certified by Google, advertisers will need to:

  • Be duly registered with
    • (a) FinCEN as a Money Services Business and with at least one state as a money transmitter; or 
    • (b) a federal or state chartered bank entity. 
  • Comply with relevant legal requirements, including any local legal requirements, whether at a state or federal level.
  • Ensure their ads and landing pages comply with all Google Ads policies

Read Google Financial Products And Services Update Here.

Article By Kadesh Carter

Cryptocurrency FAQs

Q: What are cryptocurrencies?
A: Cryptocurrency is decentralized digital money, supported blockchain technology.

Q: How can I acquire cryptocurrency?
Buying cryptocurrency through various exchanges is one of the ways through which you can get digital currency. There are other methods that are used such as crypto mining, which is more complex.

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The Big Profits In Clean Crypto: Green Bitcoin Mining

Forbes | Aug 2, 2021, 6:30am EDT | Bitcoin is infamous for wasting enough electricity to add 40 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere a year — but now, a growing cadre of U.S. miners are developing green, and lucrative, new strategies worth a fortune all their own.

Growing up in rural western Pennsylvania in the early 1970s, Bill Spence played with his pals on piles of coal waste, oblivious to the toxic heavy metals right under his feet. After working as an oil industry engineer out west, he returned home in the 1990s and found the piles—known as “gob,” for “garbage of bituminous”—still pockmarking the landscape. The present worry is that these unlined pits are leaching deadly carcinogens into the groundwater—or, worse, that they will catch fire and start polluting the air too. (Of the 772 gob piles in Pennsylvania, 38 are smoldering.) 

So Spence, now 63, set out on a mission to whittle down the piles, restore the land—and make money doing it. In 2017, he bought control of the Scrubgrass Generating power plant in Venango County, north of Pittsburgh, which was specially designed to combust gob. But gob isn’t a very good fuel, and the plant was barely viable. Later that year, after being diagnosed with pancreatic failure and kidney cancer (which he speculates may have been linked to his early gob exposure), he stepped back from the business. Bored, he started dabbling in cryptocurrencies and soon had a eureka moment: He could make the Scrubgrass numbers work by turning gob into bitcoin. 

After surgery and being taken off a feeding tube, Spence is now back at it, converting the detritus of 20th-century heavy industry into 21st-century digital gold. About 80% of Scrubgrass’ 85,000-kilowatt output is now used to run powerful, energy-hungry computers that validate bitcoin transactions and compete with computers worldwide to solve computational challenges and earn new bitcoins—a process known as mining. Depending on the price of bitcoin, which has recently been gyrating around $35,000, Scrubgrass realizes an estimated 20 cents or more per kilowatt hour (kwh) from mining, against just 3 cents selling to the power grid. Plus, because the plant is safely disposing of gob, it collects Pennsylvania renewable-energy tax credits now worth about 2 cents per kwh, the same as those available for hydropower. 

Spence is one of an emerging cohort of American bitcoin miners who are turning one of the cryptocurrency’s biggest liabilities—its insatiable thirst for energy—into an asset. Whether they’re getting rid of waste fuels like gob, helping balance the electric grid in Texas or tapping into the flares at oil-and-gas fields, these cryptopower entrepreneurs are profiting by turning digital lemons into green lemonade. And with countries such as China, Indonesia and Iran moving either to severely restrict bitcoin mining or ban it altogether, the opportunity for domestic producers has never been greater. From just a 4% share two years ago, the U.S. has grown into the world’s second largest miner, now accounting for 17% of all new bitcoins, according to the University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. 

For all bitcoin’s purported benefits, it’s also clear that the currency is an environmental disaster. Depending on bitcoin’s cost (a higher price attracts more miners), its global network sucks up between eight and 15 gigawatts of continuous power, according to Cambridge. New York City runs on just six gigawatts, the nation of Belgium on 10. Exactly how much carbon is released into the atmosphere by bitcoin mining depends entirely on what energy source is used. But the pollution is not negligible. To unlock a single bitcoin, miners must feed their machines about 150,000 kwh, enough juice to power 170 average U.S. homes for a month. 

It’s especially frustrating that high-energy inputs aren’t a bitcoin bug but rather a feature. Sure, some portion of the electricity is used to validate transactions, but much is seemingly wasted solving flat-out useless mathematical problems. This “proof of work” is simply a way to create artificial scarcity, making it far too expensive for any one group to corner or manipulate the market. In a 2010 message board comment, Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, made no apologies: “It’s the same situation as gold and gold mining. The marginal cost of gold mining tends to stay near the price of gold. Gold mining is a waste, but that waste is far less than the utility of having gold available as a medium of exchange. I think the case will be the same for bitcoin. The utility of the exchanges made possible by bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used.” 

Of course, the system could have been designed differently. There are serious cryptocurrencies, including ethereum, cardano, stellar, Ripple’s XRP and algorand, which use vastly less energy than bitcoin or are being modified to do so. Ethereum, for instance, is transitioning next year from “proof of work” to a system called “proof of stake,” which cuts energy use by 99.95%. There’s even a new currency, candela, whose protocol requires solar-powered mining. 

But bitcoin isn’t going anywhere. Its first-mover advantage has translated into a recent market cap of $700 billion, more than the five next most valuable cryptocurrencies combined. (Ether, the second most popular, has a market cap of $250 billion.) And bitcoin mining is unlikely to get much less energy-intensive. Its algorithm forces mi­ners to compete to unlock each new coin, and that competition will continue until the last bitcoin is mined, sometime around 2140. Registering a transaction on the bitcoin blockchain takes a million times more energy than processing one on Visa’s bank network. (Backers say a new Lightning transaction network designed to operate atop bitcoin could make it even more efficient than Visa.) 

“If you think it’s fake money, then any amount of energy use will be too much,” observes Ted Rogers, vice chairman of Greenidge Generation Holdings, which operates a power plant and bitcoin mining facility on Lake Seneca in upstate New York. “But bitcoin is not going away, and it is going to be the global reserve currency and the center of the future financial world.” 

To see how green bitcoin can be, look no further than the Lone Star State, whose independent power grid famously failed during last winter’s deep freeze. Dozens of power plants were knocked off­line, causing billions of dollars in property damage, and some retail customers were presented with monthly bills as high as $17,000. While the directors of the comically named Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) have since resigned, the state’s politicians—beyond mandating that plants prepare better for winter weather—haven’t done much to reform the system. 

Fortunately, the free market seems to be coming to the rescue, with 16 gigawatts of new wind and solar projects set for construction in west Texas over just the next year. During normal conditions this will be far more electricity than is needed to fill the Texas demand gap. But it will also ensure that there’s enough power for extreme events like ice storms and summer heat waves. Bitcoin miners are acting as a kind of shock absorber for this new green power. They buy up excess energy when it’s not needed, then shut down their mining rigs when demand surges, releasing power back onto the grid. 

“West Texas is going to dominate; it will all come here,” predicts Jesse Peltan, 24, CTO of Dallas-based Autonomous (and a member of the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30). Last year Peltan helped launch a 150-megawatt crypto mining data center near Midland called HODL Ranch, named for crypto hoarders who buy and then (typo inten­ded) “hodl on for dear life.” It’s the first large-scale operation to be powered by the region’s massive solar and wind farms. Some nights the gusts are so ferocious that grid operators give away power just to keep the system from overloading.

Here’s the key: These miners have entered into so-called “demand response” contracts with the Texas grid, whereby they agree, in exchange for rebates, to shut down their computers at a moment’s notice during times of peak power demand. This brings average power costs at HODL Ranch down below 2 cents per kwh, for a mining cost close to $2,000 per bitcoin. 

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5 Facts About Bitcoin

Fact #1 – There Is A Finite Supply Created

There’s a limited amount of Bitcoin. When Bitcoin was founded, the creator of the cryptocurrency only made 21 million. Right now, over 16 million are in circulation, however, more are being mined every day.

Fact #2 – It’s Important To Never Misplace Your Password/Keys

You store your Bitcoins in a digital wallet. You can log in and check your balance. One thing, though, you have to be very careful when it comes to storing your password and key, which is what allows you to access your digital Bitcoin wallet. If you lose this access, you’ll lose access to your Bitcoin wallet and the amount you have inside.

Fact # 3 – You Must Report How Much You Own

Regulations for Bitcoin are in fact still in the making, however, the U.S. government has declared that Bitcoin – as well as other cryptocurrencies – are in fact capital assets, just like bonds and stocks. Keep in mind that if you don’t account for the Bitcoins you are in possession of, you could be on the hook for tax evasion.

Fact # 4 – It’s Created Through Blockchain

Bitcoin is created through process is called mining and the core technology behind it is called Blockchain technology. It’s dependent on a network of nodes, ensuring the integrity of transaction history by achieving consensus.

Fact #5 – The Inventor Is Technically Unknown

Although Satoshi Nakamoto has been credited with developing Bitcoin in 2009, we know that most certainly this is a pseudonym for a single person or a group of people who were working on the idea. Nakamoto vanished from the Internet back in 2011, leaving only a few clues as to who he/they might be.

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