Faucet

Faucet is a reward system in form of a website or an app, which distributes the reward among the users for completing some task (for example, entering of captcha or any other given in the description). Bitcoin-faucet is a system, where Satoshis are used as a reward (this is how a one-hundred millionth part of Bitcoin is called). Chronologically, the first faucets appeared for Bitcoins exactly; they were developed by Gavin Andresen, the chief research worker of Bitcoin Foundation in 2010.

Fiat Currency

Fiat money is a currency (a medium of exchange) established as money, often by government regulation. Fiat money does not have intrinsic value and does not have use value (inherent utility, such as a cow or beaver pelt might have). It has value only because a government maintains its value, or because parties engaging in exchange agree on its value. It was introduced as an alternative to commodity money (a medium which has its own intrinsic value) and representative money (money which represents something with intrinsic value).

Inflation

In economics, inflation (or less frequently, price inflation) is a general rise in the price level in an economy over a period of time. When the general price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services; consequently, inflation reflects a reduction in the purchasing power per unit of money – a loss of real value in the medium of exchange and unit of account within the economy. The opposite of inflation is deflation, a sustained decrease in the general price level of goods and services. The common measure of inflation is the inflation rate, the annualised percentage change in a general price index, usually the consumer price index, over time. Economists believe that very high rates of inflation, also known as hyperinflation, are harmful and are caused by an excessive growth of the money supply. Views on which factors determine low to moderate rates of inflation are more varied. Low or moderate inflation may be attributed to fluctuations in real demand for goods and services, or changes in available supplies such as during scarcities. However, the consensus view is that a long sustained period of inflation is caused by money supply growing faster than the rate of economic growth.

Layer 2

As Bitcoin has become more popular, the limit began to slow down transactions. A block is added to the chain every ten minutes. With a limit on its size, only so many transactions can be added, as many as fit in a block. Globally, bitcoin cannot currently support transactions with anything like the speed of other currencies or credit cards. It sometimes takes hours to confirm a transaction. Some sites work around this problem, by conducting "off-chain payments", conducting transactions without waiting for confirmation by the blockchain.

Ledger

Transaction data is permanently recorded in files called blocks. They can be thought of as the individual pages of a city recorder's recordbook (where changes to title to real estate are recorded) or a stock transaction ledger. Blocks are organized into a linear sequence over time (also known as the blockchain). New transactions are constantly being processes by miners into new blocks which are added to the end of the chain and can never be changed or removed once accepted by the network (although some software will remove orphaned blocks).

Lightning Network

The Lightning Network is a "layer 2" payment protocol that operates on top of a blockchain-based cryptocurrency (like bitcoin). It is intended to enable fast transactions among participating nodes and has been proposed as a solution to the bitcoin scalability problem. It features a peer-to-peer system for making micropayments of cryptocurrency through a network of bidirectional payment channels without delegating custody of funds. Lightning Network implementation also simplifies atomic swaps. Normal use of the Lightning Network consists of opening a payment channel by committing a funding transaction to the relevant base blockchain (layer 1), followed by making any number of Lightning Network transactions that update the tentative distribution of the channel's funds without broadcasting those to the blockchain, optionally followed by closing the payment channel by broadcasting the final version of the settlement transaction to distribute the channel's funds.

Market Cap

Market capitalization describes the total value of all available assets of one cryptocurrency or a token. Market capitalization (market cap) is the market value of a publicly traded company's outstanding shares. Market capitalization is equal to the share price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. As outstanding stock is bought and sold in public markets, capitalization could be used as an indicator of public opinion of a company's net worth and is a determining factor in some forms of stock valuation.

Market Capitalization

Market capitalization describes the total value of all available assets of one cryptocurrency or a token. Market capitalization (market cap) is the market value of a publicly traded company's outstanding shares. Market capitalization is equal to the share price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. As outstanding stock is bought and sold in public markets, capitalization could be used as an indicator of public opinion of a company's net worth and is a determining factor in some forms of stock valuation. Market capitalization is used by the investment community in ranking the size of companies, as opposed to sales or total asset figures.

Miner

To form a distributed timestamp server as a peer-to-peer network, bitcoin uses a proof-of-work system. This work is often called bitcoin mining. Requiring a proof of work to accept a new block to the blockchain was Satoshi Nakamoto's key innovation. The mining process involves identifying a block that, when hashed twice with SHA-256, yields a number smaller than the given difficulty target. While the average work required increases in inverse proportion to the difficulty target, a hash can always be verified by executing a single round of double SHA-256. For the bitcoin timestamp network, a valid proof of work is found by incrementing a nonce until a value is found that gives the block's hash the required number of leading zero bits. Once the hashing has produced a valid result, the block cannot be changed without redoing the work. As later blocks are chained after it, the work to change the block would include redoing the work for each subsequent block. Majority consensus in bitcoin is represented by the longest chain, which required the greatest amount of effort to produce. If a majority of computing power is controlled by honest nodes, the honest chain will grow fastest and outpace any competing chains.

Mining

Bitcoin mining is the process of making computer hardware do mathematical calculations for the Bitcoin network to confirm transactions and increase security. As a reward for their services, Bitcoin miners can collect transaction fees for the transactions they confirm, along with newly created bitcoins. Mining is a specialized and competitive market where the rewards are divided up according to how much calculation is done. Not all Bitcoin users do Bitcoin mining, and it is not an easy way to make money.