Cryptocurrency Glossary / dictionary

A faucet is a mechanism that continuously gives away tiny amounts of free cryptocurrency. You usually need to go to a faucet website and perform one or more simple tasks on that site to qualify for the giveaway. The tasks are generally very minor, like reading an article, clicking a captcha, viewing a video, or looking at an advertisement. Due to the faucet's very slow drip, it can take quite a while to earn even 1 dollar's worth of crypto. Faucets are sometimes created to be educational and to spread the word about a new cryptocurrency - this is what bitcoin did in its early days. Other faucets use advertising on the page or affiliate offers to pay for the distribution and make their own profit. There are sites, like FaucetDump, where you can find a list of the more common faucets.

"FBA" means Federated Byzantine Agreement. It is one of the many types of consensus algorithms for cryptocurrency.  It is a special type of "Byzantine Agreement" scheme. A basic Byzantine Agreement is the common way to validate blocks of data on a blockchain via a "voting" process. Participating blockchain nodes vote on proposed block solutions. If a predetermined minimum number of voting nodes agree then the block is accepted and added to the blockchain. The term "Federated" modifies this behavior a little by allowing voting nodes to accept the voting choice of a set of other voting nodes. These other voting nodes must, of course, have been deemed to be trustworthy ahead of time. The Ripple blockchain was one of the first networks to use FBA as their consensus algorithm.  

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Fiat Currency is currency declared by any government to be legal tender in that country.  It is almost always paper money and physical coins.  Examples of fiat currency are British Pounds, Japanese Yen, United States dollars, Europen Euros, Chinese Yuan, etc.  There is no fixed exchange rate between fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies.  The rate changes by the second and depends on what buyers are willing to pay in that moment.

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The term Flipping usually refers to the event when some cryptocurrency's market cap becomes worth more than bitcoin. It has not happened yet, but many people assume that the cryptocurrency ether will be the one to take the market cap crown from bitcoin. In a more traditional investment sense, flipping can also mean to buy an asset and then sell it a short time later at a profit. Flipping can be done with assets such as stocks, real estate, or cryptocurrency.

FOMO means Fear Of Missing Out. In regards to cryptocurrency, it is the physiological condition that causes people to rush to buy some coin as its price is going up. They fear missing out on a substantial future profit. They also hope (and often assume) that the price will keep going up. This mistake is usually more common in those who are new to cryptocurrency, but old hands can also get caught up in the euphoria. Fear Of Missing Out also applies to many other things besides cryptocurrency. It can also apply to the stock market investors and even to social media. If you see your friends having extraordinary times in their posts, you may fear that you are missing out on the fun.

A Fork is most often created by an intentional change in the fundamental software program that runs a cryptocurrency's blockchain. A small percentage of other forks are caused by hackers trying to fraudulently manipulate the blockchain. Forks come in two possible flavors. They can be Soft forks or Hard forks.

• A Soft fork is usually the result of adding some new software feature or fixing a minor bug. A soft fork is backward compatible and so does not affect historical transactions. From a coin user perspective, nothing really changed.
• A Hard fork is a much more drastic change to the blockchains operating software. It makes it incompatible with the original blockchain. It creates a new coin with an entirely new branch of the blockchain for its future transactions. When a Hard fork occurs, the original blockchain may continue on its own path using the original software. After the split, both branches may successfully grow, or one, or both may die out for various reasons.

Complementary new coins that may be obtained due to some special types of Hard forks. A newly spawned blockchain may allocate an equal number of new cryptocurrency for the original owners.

FUD means "Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt". FUD can be a strong emotional response to a situation, such as watching bitcoin soar or crash. It is often related to an investor's decision to buy or not buy a cryptocurrency.  It can cause paralysis so no decision is made at all.

But FUD can also be an anticompetitive tactic. One company can install FUD in its customer's minds to not buy similar competitor's products. This is often by creating false or misleading information about the competitor. 

Fungible means that one unit of currency is perfectly interchangeable with another unit of the same type of currency. For example, one unit of bitcoin is just as good and has just as much value as any other same-sized unit of bitcoin. Bitcoin is fungible. Any item for sale that takes bitcoin will take ANY bitcoin, regardless of that bitcoin's history. A dollar bill is also fungible since you can receive a $100 bill from a coworker and pay him back a different $100 without question.

But fungibility also has gray areas. For example, some bitcoins could become non-fungible if governments start to track and restrict certain bitcoin suspected to have been used criminally. This could be done due to the ability to monitor bitcoin as it moves through the blockchain. BUT, as bitcoin are split up and used in different ways and "mixed", how can the trail be followed?