Many moons ago I sat in coffee shops and church basements in 12-step meetings. I had been an addict for several years. I'm no longer addicted to anything but caffeine, nicotine, and sugar. Those 12-step meetings helped to keep me alive and informed much of my thinking throughout the rest of my life.
One of the most important lessons I learned was to sit down and shut up.
In these meetings, it was customary for people to stand up, either in their seats or at a podium, and tell the story of their addiction and recovery; what we used to be like, what happened, and how it is now. The tendency many newcomers (a person newly clean and sober, usually under 30 days to 1 year) had was to stand up and share their stories, rambling on at length, glorifying their addiction, and preaching about sobriety.
The problem with this isn't the rambling. The problem is the preaching about something they had no knowledge of. Newcomers were told to sit down and shut up. Not because they didn't have any value to offer, but because they needed to learn, to listen, to absorb from the healthier people in those rooms.
I'm a newcomer to cryptocurrency.
Basically, I'm a newborn babe in the woods. The forest of trees is confusing and confounding. Not only must I learn the names of the trees, but I must also learn the name of the forest, the country the forest is in, and the anagrams of each name.
It's an entire language I must learn. Words in English that don't mean what I think they mean. Words like Airdrop, Bear Trap, and Candlestick mean completely different things than to drop food or supplies from a plane, a device to trap bears, and a stick made of wax that when lit creates light.
With an eye toward educating myself on the new language, I often visit the crypto dictionary Decryptionary I also read as many crypto articles as I can. I ask my husband what certain words mean. He plays the stock market and understands more than I.
One of the most bothersome acronyms is HODL. It just looks like a careless misspelling. When I looked it up, I discovered that is exactly what it is. HODL has also come to mean "Hold On for Dear Life" but is believed to have been started in this post.
Are you a bully?
I haven't seen or read any bullying behavior (not to be confused with the Bull market!) here on this platform, but I have read stories by other newcomers talking about how they feel they don't belong here because they don't yet know anything or enough about cryptocurrency.
I have noticed a human tendency to use exclusivity of language to promote inclusion and exclusion in any given group. The cryptocurrency world is a clique within the bigger clique of financial investing. It's a subclique. For many years crypto fans were a bunch of upstart tech nerds without family money or good ole boy connections of the typical market traders. I understand the temptation to try to set yourself apart from a perceived social set. When I was a kid "trendy" was a bad word.
Inclusion rather than exclusion.
So, while I, an admitted newcomer, sit down and shut up in order to learn, I hope you oldtimers who have the jargon and the lingo down, don't exclude me from your clique. After all, the more people understand and invest in cryptocurrency the more popular it becomes, and the more value it will have for each individual portfolio.
I would love to see articles written in plain English. If an acronym is used, define it. If the word means something different in English than in Cryptolingo, define it. Don't leave us noobs to guess and give up because we don't get it. Don't alienate fellow enthusiasts just because you are in the IN crowd. Welcome us. Include us.
Definitions
Airdrop:
Airdrop is defined as the process of freely distributing a new cryptocurrency to people hopefully creating more demand.
When a new cryptocurrency is created, it needs to gain users. One way of doing this through an airdrop. The group issuing the airdrop hopes new users will begin researching and sharing the coin creating more demand.
To start an airdrop, the crypto group will often find people who already have another cryptocurrency and identify them as being equipped with wallets that can accept these airdropped coins.
Their other option is to have people voluntarily complete a form where they will then receive their coins.
Bear Trap:
Investing is a tricky endeavor, and there are many tricks and traps that the uninitiated can fall into.
The bear trap is one of them. A bear trap is a technical pattern that occurs when the performance of a stock, index, or other financial instrument incorrectly signals a reversal of a rising price trend.
The trap is thus a false reversal of a declining price trend. Bear traps can tempt investors to take long positions based on the anticipation of price movements that do not occur.
Candlestick
A candlestick is a type of price chart used in technical analysis that displays the high, low, open, and closing prices of a security for a specific period.
It originated from Japanese rice merchants and traders to track market prices and daily momentum hundreds of years before becoming popularized in the United States. The wide part of the candlestick is called the "real body" and tells investors whether the closing price was higher or lower than the opening price (black/red if the stock closed lower, white/green if the stock closed higher).
