0xb100d / dictionary

A lisiting of terminology for internal consistent use at the DCI, but published to serve as reference externally. PR's welcome!

A lisiting of terminology for internal consistent use at the DCI, but published to serve as reference externally. PR's welcome!

Ideally, we will tag a release once this is somewhat populated. We should probably standardize capitalization.

The tricky part is that upper-case bitcoin might mean something different than lower-case, but suggest that we use uppercase for everything on this list and note anything that should be in lower case. - Joi

Dictionary

Term	Definition
Bitcoin
bitcoin
Blind Signature	A digital signature where the content of a message is disguised before it is signed. This allows privacy to be maintained when the message author and signer are different parties.
Blockchain Technology	Blockchain technology may refer to any form of public ledger that solves the double-spending and consensus problems or can mean more narrowly a public ledger based on the Bitcoin proof of work system.
Blockchain, The	"The Blockchain" is the Bitcoin ledger connected to the Bitcoin genesis block.
Bloom Filter	A probablistic set data structure, the "opposite" of a cache. Can return a false positive for membership, but never a false negative.
Byzantine Fault Tolerance	A system that can continue to operate with up to f failures under the byzantine failure model. Under this failure model, faulty nodes may operate arbitrarily.
Censorship Resistant	A system is censorship resistant if no user can block another user's actions
Consensus
Consistency	Every node in the network is guaranteed to have some amount of information be the same
Core Developer	A developer with commit access to the main source code repository for a project.
Core Contributor	A developer who has written code that has been accepted into the main source code repository for a project.
Core Maintainer	The lead Core Developer for a project, oversees development, merges, and releases.
Fork
Hard Fork	An ocurrence when the software to maintain a consensus based network (like a blockchain) changes on some nodes but not others, and both types of nodes continue working towards independent consensus on two separate networks. Can happen by accident due to a bug in software which can cause a reorganization of the chain and requires nodes to update software. Can also happen on purpose when a change to original consensus codebase is made expressly to introduce new rules that are not compatible with old consensus rules. In this second scenario this could be done in the case of a unanimous upgrade to a new codebase (wherein ~all people will upgrade to the new software and the old one will cease to run on any nodes) or contentiously, when someone or a group of people change the consensus mechanism and others do not agree to the change, in which case two parallel networks will continue to run.
Hash
Hash Chain	The successive application of a hash function to a piece of data. The hash function can be applied successively to additional pieces of data in order to record the chronology of data's existence and secure non-repudiation.
Hash Rate	The amount of hashes that can be caculated by a given hardware.
Jeremy Rubin	Bitcoin hacker and generally viewed as a troublemaker.
Ledger	A list of transactions, like a receipt.
Merkle Tree	a hash tree data structure for efficiently committing to information. Informally, given a hash h, MerkleTree(h,a) = h(MerkleTree(a[:half])+MerkleTree(a[half:])). Proofs of membership are O(log n)
Mining
Node	A computer running consensus code. A machine running blockchain software for a given network.
Non-repudiation	A state where the validity of a signature will not be able to be successfully challenged.
Private Key
Proof of Stake
Proof of Work (pow)
Public Key
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
Scalability
SHA-256
Sidechain
Signature
Soft Fork	A change to consensus code that does not result in two parallel chains, but instead changes features of a blockchain that nodes running older software still deems valid even if they don't fully understand some of the data.
Tidbit
Timestamp
Transaction	Generally, an operation that should have at most once semantics, such as a transfer of funds.
User
Validating	A process wherin nodes determine whether transactions on a network followed all consensus rules; this is an automatic process done by node software.
Wallet	The software used for interfacing with a cryptocurrency to create new transactions or view previous activity.
Zero Knowledge Proof	A proof which does not reveal the way in which is was proved. For example, it could be proven that one knows the prime factors of a number without revealing the factors.

We may want to put these in a different document but:

Other Bitcoin glossaries and dictionaries

Site	URL
Bitcoin Simplified	http://bitcoinsimplified.org/definitions/
Bitcoin.org	https://bitcoin.org/en/vocabulary
coinbase	https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/1833695-bitcoin-glossary
CoinDesk	http://www.coindesk.com/information/bitcoin-glossary/
Oleg Andreev	https://github.com/oleganza/bitcoin-papers/blob/master/BitcoinGlossary.md