Part20 - US content creation for blocktrades_US

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Public & Private keys

A public key is used to encrypt digital data messages intended to be sent to an external recipient, who can then - if that external recipient has access to a corresponding private key - decrypt said data. In simpler terms: the public key is used to convert messages into a format outsiders cannot read, and the private key that belongs to that public key enables the intended message recipient to again convert that message in a readable state.
The combination, or pairing, of private and public keys allows for trustless transactions, one of the fundamental ingredients for cryptographic and blockchain technology.

Although technically not identical, in layman's terminology, a private key can be compared to a password used to access an account.

Pump-and-Dump Schemes

A frequently occurring attempt, conducted by both coordinated groups of investors and large (often anonymous) individual token holders of a given asset, to drastically boost ("Pump") and crash ("Dump") the asset's price, for their own financial gains, and at the expense of others. Usually these Pump-and-Dumps are initiated by first slowly accumulating a large amount of the asset at a lower price, and then to spread often misleading recommendations intended to seduce others into later on buying said asset under the guise of "expected price increases". In case such a "Pump" succeeds due to a sudden high buying volume caused by the false or exaggerated rumours, the asset's price first quickly rises, and while price is high and new investors are still buying the asset, the Pump initiators quickly sell their previously accumulated assets before price falls down fast, referred to as the "Dump".

Because there exist so many cryptocurrency pairs with low trading volume and because there exist so-called "algorithmic trading bots" that follow predefined or artifially "learned" trading scenarios, Pumps-and-Dumps also exist without prior "false rumours" being spread: in such a scenario, a large token holder or a coordinated group of smaller token holders first slowly accumulate a large amount of tokens of a given cryptocurrency, and then begin to increase their buying volume which - in this case intentionally - increases the asset's price at a rapid pace. This rapid price increase in turn gets noticed by both algorithmic trading bots and human traders who in turn also decide to buy the asset at a temporary increasing price: a "snowball effect" happening without prior spreading of rumours. When the "pumpers" have reached their price target and / or notice growing selling pressure, they decide to quickly sell their tokens while price is still high, most often leading to a rapid decrease in price referred to as "crash" or "dump".

Potential investors should always do their own research prior to buying (or selling) a certain asset: consider the trustworthiness of a news source and the likelihood of an asset's sudden price increase or decrease.

Satoshi

Refers to either -a- the first name of the pseudonymous name Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of Bitcoin, or to -b- the smallest divisible unit of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, one hundred millionth of a single bitcoin (0.00000001 BTC). For the latter meaning, 1 satoshi is often being abbreviated as "sat".

Please note that although 1 Bitcoin can only be divided into one hundred million sats, payment channels which are recently being used with the second-layer protocol "Lightning" can use even smaller granularity as millisatoshi, which equals one hundred billionth of one Bitcoin.

Satoshi Nakamoto

The pseudonymous name which is used by either the person or group of persons that first invented and published about the creation of Bitcoin (BTC) via the famous Bitcoin whitepaper, and developed and deployed the original Bitcoin reference implementation. After first publishing said Bitcoin whitepaper in october 2008, in reaction to the financial crisis from which many financial instutions either went bankrupt or had to be privatised by governmental intervention, and while being active on specific internet forums, about two years later (december 2010) nothing has been heared from Satoshi Nakamoto ever since.

However, since, adding more fuel to the rumours and mystery surrounding Satoshi Nakamoto, many people have claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, where others have speculated about Satoshi Nakamoto's real life identity: some have analysed his mailinglist messages and code comments' style of writing and concluded Satoshi Nakamoto is of Brittish origin (e.g usage of the words "bloody hard", referencing The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks in the Bitcoin genesys block, referring to London-based "The Times" newspaper, and analysing message timestamp data indicating almost no messages between 5 AM and 11 AM GMT).
Whether the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto will ever be known publicly, is highly uncertain.

Stablecoins

As various (digital) assets can be exchanged or traded for another type of asset, an asset's value is in a constant state of flux. Many cryptocurrencies are quite volatile in terms of price and market value, and even though such volatility can be considered as the "lifeblood" of a trader (the high crypto volatility is often said to be one of the reasons why daytrading crypto is interesting to many), that same volatility is frequently considered to be less useful for retail transactions. Wild price swings, high volatility rates, can make a purchase of goods or services unprofitable, which may be a reason both for merchants and consumers to avoid cryptocurrencies.

A crypto stablecoin however, is pegged to the value of a corresponding (stable) asset, like fiat money such as for example the US Dollar or Euro. The price fluctuations of such a stablecoin compared to its pegged original asset, are often minimal. Stablecoins therefore allow for being used as stable cryptocurrency in goods & services transactions - provided there's a sufficient merchant adoption - and also to "hedge against" a potential drop in value of other, non-stable, cryptocurrencies.

Examples of crypto stablecoins are USDT (Tether), Paxos Standard, TrueUSD, Gemini Dollar and EURS.