Bag / Bagholder
An investor or shareholder left holding shares of worthless stocks or any financial instruments that become worthless, such as the coins of a failed cryptocurrency.
Bear / Bearish
A market condition in which investors expect downward price movement of stocks or assets (like bitcoin or gold), and/or any entity who generally holds negative sentiment about the price of a stock or asset.
Bit
Bit is a common unit used to designate a sub-unit of a bitcoin - 1,000,000 bits is equal to 1 bitcoin (BTC).
Bitcoin
Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency created by an unknown person or group of people under the name Satoshi Nakamoto and released as open-source software in 2009. Bitcoin has no central issuer... instead, the peer-to-peer network regulates Bitcoins, transactions and issuance according to consensus in network software. These transactions are verified by network nodes through the use of cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain.
Bitcoin Address
A Bitcoin address is similar to a physical address or an email. It is the only information you need to provide for someone to pay you with Bitcoin. Addresses are anonymous and do not contain information about the owner. A bitcoin address can be obtained for freeusing specialized Bitcoin software. Bitcoin address example: 14qViLJfdGaP7EeHnDyJbBGQysnCpwk3gd. Addresses can be generated at no cost by any user of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Client
A type of end-user software for receiving and/or interacting with data from the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin clients function as wallets and can sign transactions. Some clients function as light nodes and others as full nodes.
Bitcoin Core
Bitcoin Core is free and open-source software that serves as a bitcoin node (the set of which form the bitcoin network) and provides a bitcoin wallet which fully verifies payments. It is considered to be bitcoin's reference implementation. Initially, the software was published by Satoshi Nakamoto under the name "Bitcoin", and later renamed to "Bitcoin Core" to distinguish it from the network. It is also known as the Satoshi client.
Bitcoin Halving
The amount of bitcoins issued in each block reward is halved every 210,000 blocks (approximately every 4 years). The supply of bitcoin is finite; there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin in existence. In 2008, block rewards were set to issue 50 bitcoins; in November 2012 this amount became 25 bitcoins, and in July 2016 it became 12.5. Following this schedule, it is estimated that the last bitcoin will be mined in the year 2140, when the cap of 21 million bitcoins is reached.
Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)
Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) is a design document for introducing features or information to Bitcoin. The BIP should provide a concise technical specification of the attribute and a rationale for the feature.
Bitcoin Network
The bitcoin network is a peer-to-peer payment network that operates on a cryptographic protocol. Users send and receive bitcoins, the units of currency, by broadcasting digitally signed messages to the network using bitcoin cryptocurrency wallet software. Transactions are recorded into a distributed, replicated public database known as the blockchain, with consensus achieved by a proof-of-work system called mining. Satoshi Nakamoto, the designer of bitcoin, claimed that design and coding of bitcoin began in 2007. The project was released in 2009 as open source software.
