Anti-Money Laundering and Know-Your-Customer regulations required by bitcoin exchanges in order to register an account, similar to creating a stock brokerage account. There is no impact on credit score, but a social-security number, driver's license or government-passport, etc. are required.

A company's platform that serves as an on/off-ramp into the bitcoin ecosystem, enabling to connect a bank account, deposit dollars, purchase bitcoin, and send bitcoin to a wallet. Alternatively, one can deposit bitcoin from a wallet, sell bitcoin, buy dollars, and withdraw to a bank account.

An up to ~2MB group of transactions that has been confirmed by miners and cryptographically secured within the blockchain.

A slow, redundant, secure, decentralization-enabling database structure that stores all transactions in Bitcoin's history.

A long, seemingly-random string of letters and numbers provided by your wallet where you get change: leftover bitcoin from a send transaction. A type of address in one's wallet where their remaining bitcoin is sent back to themselves when sending a portion of their bitcoin to someone else (to their receive address).

A reference to bitcoin that is secured by a private key only ever used in an isolated manner via a signing device.

A mobile wallet on your computer.

Paid by people sending bitcoin transactions. Miners are incentivized to prioritize higher-fee unconfirmed transactions in the mempool to verify and place in the next block.

An incorrect term to reference a signing device.

A reference to a wallet that stores the private key locally, without a signing device; thus, not secure for savings, but convenient for small purchases.

A network built as a 2nd layer on top of the bitcoin network, offering less security, optimizing for speed, efficiency, and low fees. Primarily used for bitcoin transactions in commerce.

A digital location that unconfirmed bitcoin transactions are stored until confirmed by miners and added to the blockchain.

An additional recovery method to restore a private key on the Passport signing device. An encrypted file is put on the microSD during device setup. If needed, the file can be used to restore the private key if the correct backup code is used. These can only recover (or hack) the private key if used together; thus, they should be stored/secured separately.

Hardware expending energy to verify bitcoin transactions in the mempool, adding them to the blockchain.

Uses your public key to create a wallet interface, capable of creating send transactions, which can either be authorized by a local private key (unsecure) or isolated private key via signing device (secure). A rule of thumb is to not keep more value than you would store in your wallet with a local private key, whereas an isolated private key via signing device is more comparable to a savings account level of security.

A wallet-configuration that requires multiple private keys, stored locally or on signing devices, in order to authorize a send transaction. One example setup is 2-of-3, meaning 3 public keys configure the wallet and only 2 of their corresponding private keys are required to spend the bitcoin.

Hardware that hosts the entire database of the blockchain and checks for foul-play. At less than 1TB, a node can be effectively run by anyone with negligible power cost, enabling one to operate on the Bitcoin network without trusting a wallet provider's transaction history.

A sequence of numbers to access a signing device. If entered incorrectly too many times, the signing device will erase all data including the stored private key.

An additional password layer applied on-top of a seed phrase, generating an entirely new private key.

The password needed for spending your bitcoin. Whoever has the private key, functionally owns the corresponding bitcoin.

An identifier for where your bitcoin is held. Provides view access to the bitcoin balance, transactions receive addresses, change addresses, and UTXO's, but has no spending ability.

A long, seemingly-random string of letters and numbers provided by your wallet where you can receive bitcoin. If a sender even messed up one single character, the bitcoin is lost and unrecoverable. Always copy/paste instead of typing it out, confirm first/last 7 characters prior to submitting a transaction, and send a small test amount prior to a large transaction.

Used to restore a bitcoin wallet if the device is lost or broken. Most commonly, a seed phrase is used, but other methods like the microSD card + backup phrase from Passport can be utilized. If no seed phrase is accessible, but there's still the device and any associated PIN code, then bitcoin can be sent to a new wallet with refreshed recovery methods. If any recovery method is compromised, then a new wallet with refreshed recovery methods is top priority. Custodying bitcoin requires responsibility; if either the seed phrase or the device + PIN code have been lost or broken, then the bitcoin is unrecoverable. Period.

A 100,000,000th of a bitcoin. Like 100 cents is equivalent to 1 dollar, 100,000,000 satoshis or sats are equivalent to 1 bitcoin.

A human-readable version of your private key usually in the form of 12, 18, or 24 words. Should be stored on durable paper or steel, never taking a picture of it, typing it into a keyboard, saying it out loud, etc.

A focused, single-purpose device securely storing a private key, isolated from the internet and vulnerabilities from complex devices. Used to authorize transactions to spend bitcoin requested by a mobile/desktop wallet.

Consult with a tax professional for tax advice. Generally, taxable events involving bitcoin include, but are not limited to: selling bitcoin (capital gains tax), sending bitcoin for a good/service (capital gains tax), transferring bitcoin to a wallet that isn't yours (capital gains tax), earning bitcoin (income tax), receiving bitcoin for a good/service (income tax), mining bitcoin (income tax), and exchanging bitcoin for another cryptocurrency (capital gains tax).

Unspent-Transaction-Output. Bitcoin exists in a wallet in the form of UTXOs like dollars exist in your wallet in the form of bills. You may have a total of $40 in your wallet, but it's actually a $20 bill and 2 $10 bills; additionally, one can't magically turn a $10 bill into 2 $5 bills without making a transaction. When bitcoin is sent to a new wallet, one or more of the sender's UTXO's are processed into a recipient's UTXO in one of their wallet's receive addresses for the amount they're receiving, a fee paid to the miner that publishes this transaction in a bitcoin block, and a 2nd UTXO back to the sender's wallet in one of their wallet's change addresses for the remainder amount (like how a purchaser would be handed $20 back after using a $100 bill for an $80 purchase).