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Price volatility

Used to describe an asset's price fluctuation, usually in the form of a day-to-day percentage difference. The percentage degree at which price fluctuates, NOT the actual price level itself, ergo the asset's volatility, describes if an asset's market is to be considered volatile.

Many cryptocurrencies currently have the characteristic of being highly volatile: because the technology is still relatively new and because its market's volumes are still relatively small (albeit a relative comparison to other asset types), high volatility also reflects price uncertainty. For some applications, such as investment speculation and day trading, high volatility is considered to be interesting, and for others, such as everyday value transactions on the buying and selling of goods and services, high volatility is considered a burden. In order to deal with the latter case, the concept of "stablecoins" have been introduced at a growing popularity among its users.

Privacy Cryptocurrency

Even though most cryptocurrencies can be considered to be anonymous - a wallet address doesn't contain the name of its owner -, due to its ledger being publicly readable, transactions to or from a given wallet address can be traced and analysed for transaction patterns. If you use a Bitcoin address to buy - for example - books from a well-known online retailer with a known public address, and in case the private databases of that retailer are confiscated (either legally by government officials or illegally via a hack), the transaction timestamps can be cross-referenced to determine your exact order data. (Which is of course also possible in a similar case using regular credit or debit card fiat payments).

In order to add an additional layer of anonymity, a number of privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies exist. One such well-known Privacy Cryptocurrency is Monero (XMR) that uses mechanisms such as "ring signatures", "stealth addresses" and "Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT)" to hide the identities of both a transactions sender and receiver, as well as the transaction amount (RingCT). Monero transactions are therefore untraceable.
Other examples (to name a few) of Privacy Cryptocurrencies include ZCash (ZEC), Verge (XVG), and Dash.

Even though malicious actors could decide to use such Privacy Cryptocurrencies to obfuscate and hide any traces of their criminal activities (hacks for example), there exist a number of perfectly valid reasons somebody else, without wanting to do any harm, wants to preserve full anonimity regarding their cryptocurrency transactions.

Proof of Stake (POS) Consensus

Proof of Stake is a consensus protocol used as an alternative to Proof of Work. Proof of Stake determines a miner's / block producer's ability to mine / validate block transactions as determined by how many tokens the miner holds himself. The more tokens a miner has, the more mining power he has.

As opposed to Proof of Work, with which an enormous amount of computing power is used to solve cryptographic challenges / puzzles, which is both considered to be "safe" but also inefficient and "power hungry", and potentially having the risk of a 51% Attack which could happen when a miner or pool of miners control(s) (more than) 51% of all network computational power, with Proof of Stake in case a miner owns for example 4% of all tokens he can only mine 4% or the transactions.

Proof of Work (POW) Consensus

Proof of Work is a consensus protocol directly connecting mining capabilities to computational power. In order to validate a transaction for inclusion into a block, those blocks need to be hashed. In and by itself this cryptographic hashing is a relatively straightforward and easy computational task, but in order to incentivise competition among block producers / miners the hashing process is made more difficult by adding an additional variable, a cryptographic puzzle. The more computing power ("hash rates") is added to the entire blockchain network, the more complex the hashing process is made. Because "computational work" needs to be done in order to successfully hash, a successful hash must have required considerable effort / work, hence a hashed block is assumed to be "Proof of Work".

In order to incentivise miners to add their computational power to the blockchain network, rewards are given to the first miner to successfully hash a block. In the case of the Bitcoin (and also Litecoin) blockchain for example, per block, currently the rewards are 12.5 new Bitcoins. This immense computational power costs both hardware, system maintenance, housing and electricity expenses. In case the spot price of Bitcoin is high, as compared to mining costs, mining is very profitable, more mining capacity and therefore computational power is added to the network, which in turn leads to an increasing hashing complexity / mining difficulty (making it harder to solve the cryptographic puzzles). In case Bitcoin price is low, mining rewards are lower than mining costs, so in turn some miners shutdown their mining equipment, leading to a reduced amount of hashing power, which leads to a decreased hashing complexity / mining difficulty.

As a consequence, Bitcoin's network hash rate / mining difficulty is strongly correlated to Bitcoin price.

Protocol

In an information technology context, a "protocol" may be perceived as a specific set of rules that prescribe how specific data is transmitted. In a cryptocurrency context, such a protocol refers to the rule set being applied to certain actions on a specific blockchain network.