Culture & history
Bitcoin's slang is not decoration. Much of it is shorthand for events that cost people real money, and knowing the story is usually the point.
Mt. Gox is the clearest case. For a while it handled most of the bitcoin trading in the world, then it collapsed, and creditors waited more than a decade for a distribution. Not your keys, not your coins is not a phrase invented for social media. It is the lesson from that, repeated after every exchange failure since.
Other entries are older and stranger. The whitepaper is here, and so are the cypherpunks who were arguing about digital cash a decade before it. Bitcoin Pizza Day marks the first known purchase of a physical good with bitcoin. HODL started as a typo in a forum post written by somebody having a bad night.
Satoshi Nakamoto is here, with what is actually known kept separate from what is guessed. So are the forks that split the community rather than just the code, and the names people call each other during them. None of this is optional trivia if you plan to spend time in bitcoin communities, where half of what gets said assumes you already know it.
18 terms. Last reviewed 2026-09-24.
Terms in Culture & history
- AltcoinAltcoin means any cryptocurrency that is not bitcoin, from Namecoin in 2011 to the thousands of tokens launched since, each with its own rules, team, and failure modes.
- Bitcoin maximalismalso MaximalismBitcoin maximalism is the position that bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency worth owning, and that every other chain competes for attention it will eventually lose.
- Bitcoin Pizza DayBitcoin Pizza Day is May 22, the anniversary of the 2010 trade in which Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoin for two delivered pizzas, the first documented purchase of goods.
- Bitcoin whitepaperalso WhitepaperThe bitcoin whitepaper is the nine page paper published on October 31, 2008 that describes a payment system settling without a bank, by chaining proof of work into a public history.
- Block size waralso Blocksize warThe block size war was the 2015 to 2017 fight over whether bitcoin should raise its block size limit by hard fork, and it ended with SegWit and a chain split.
- CypherpunkA cypherpunk is a member of the privacy movement that argued from the early 1990s that strong cryptography, rather than legislation, is what protects individuals from surveillance.
- El Salvador Bitcoin LawThe El Salvador Bitcoin Law made bitcoin legal tender alongside the US dollar from September 2021, and was amended in January 2025 to make acceptance voluntary.
- FOMOalso Fear of missing outFOMO, fear of missing out, is the buying impulse that arrives after a price has already run, and it is the single most expensive emotion in bitcoin.
- FUDalso Fear, uncertainty and doubtFUD stands for fear, uncertainty and doubt, a label bitcoin holders attach to negative claims, sometimes correctly and sometimes to wave away a real warning.
- HODLalso HodlingHODL is bitcoin slang for holding through volatility instead of trading, born from a misspelled forum post and now shorthand for a long horizon strategy.
- Mt. Goxalso MtGoxMt. Gox was the Tokyo exchange that handled most bitcoin trading until February 2014, when it froze withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy with 850,000 coins missing.
- Not your keys, not your coinsNot your keys, not your coins is the warning that bitcoin left on an exchange is a claim against a company, not bitcoin you actually control.
- Orange pillOrange pill is the slang for the moment someone stops dismissing bitcoin and starts studying it, borrowed from The Matrix and colored after the bitcoin logo.
- Proof of KeysProof of Keys is the annual January 3 exercise in which holders withdraw their coins from every custodian, testing both the platform's solvency and their own backups.
- Satoshi NakamotoSatoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym of the person or group who published the bitcoin whitepaper, released the first software, mined the earliest blocks, and then walked away.
- ShitcoinShitcoin is blunt slang for a coin the speaker believes has no reason to exist, usually one built to be sold to latecomers rather than used.
- Silk RoadSilk Road was the darknet market where bitcoin was the only accepted payment, and its 2013 takedown shaped how governments and banks saw the currency for years.
- Stacking satsStacking sats means accumulating bitcoin in small satoshi sized amounts on a regular basis, treating the 100 million unit subdivision of a coin as the thing you count.
The other 13 sections
- BasicsWhat bitcoin is, what a satoshi is, and the handful of ideas the rest of the glossary is built on.
- Addresses & keysWhere coins get sent, what a private key actually controls, and how one seed produces thousands of addresses.
- Wallets & custodyHot, cold, custodial and multisig, and what each one changes about who can move your coins.
- Privacy & securityThe attacks that take people's bitcoin, and the habits and tools that stop them.
- Transactions & feesWhat a bitcoin transaction is made of, why it costs what it costs, and how to unstick one.
- Buying & exchangesOrder types, spreads and fee schedules: the vocabulary an exchange uses while it is charging you.
- Markets & investingMarket cap, volatility and spot ETFs. The language of price, without the price predictions.
- Mining & consensusHow new blocks get made, what difficulty adjusts, and why the rules hold with nobody in charge.
- Protocol & upgradesSegWit, Taproot, soft forks and BIPs: how bitcoin changes and who gets to decide.
- Lightning & layer 2Payment channels, invoices and routing, for moving bitcoin without paying for space in a block.
- Regulation & taxKYC, the Travel Rule, MiCA and capital gains: the rules that reach your account and your tax return.
- Nodes & softwareBitcoin Core, full nodes, pruning and RPC: the software that enforces the rules.
- Developer referenceP2P message types, opcodes and script terms: the field names you meet reading bitcoin code.
Frequently asked questions
Why does bitcoin have so much slang?
Because most of it is shorthand for events that cost people real money. HODL came from a misspelled forum post during a crash. Not your keys, not your coins came from exchanges failing with customer funds still inside them.
What was Mt. Gox and why does it still come up?
The exchange that handled most bitcoin trading until it collapsed in 2014 having lost hundreds of thousands of coins. Creditors were still being repaid a decade later. It is the origin of nearly every warning about leaving coins on an exchange.
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
The pseudonym of whoever published the bitcoin whitepaper in 2008 and the first software in 2009, then stopped posting in 2011. The identity has never been established, and the coins mined in that early period have never moved.
What was the block size war about?
Whether to raise the block size limit to allow more transactions, fought out between 2015 and 2017. It ended without the increase, and it settled a larger question along the way: that node operators, not miners or companies, decide what bitcoin is.