Diamond hands
Or as Elon Musk put it in a May tweet: 💎🙌. Diamond hands is a meme popularized by crypto and stock traders on Reddit. It connotes a hardcore adherence to the HODL philosophy (see below) — and is often used by online groups that have banded together to try to drive up the price of a memecoin or other asset. (The related-but-derogatory term for skittish traders? “Paper hands”/🧻🤲. )
FOMO
Stands for “fear of missing out” — and is generally most intense when markets are rising fast. FOMO can lead to emotional trading and bad decision making — it’s dangerous because hindsight is 20/20, making it all too easy to regret the gains you would have made if you had only timed all your trades perfectly. (Nobody times all of their trades perfectly.)
A good way to reduce FOMO is to have a strategy and stick to it, especially if you believe that the asset you’re investing in will rise in value over the longer term. One popular option is dollar-cost averaging (or DCA), in which you invest the same amount every week or month without worrying about what the market is doing.
The flippening
The flippening is a hypothetical event in which Ethereum’s market cap will one day eclipse Bitcoin’s. It can also be used to describe any similar situation where a smaller or less-established token or protocol might overtake a larger rival.
HODL
HODL is probably the most prevalent piece of crypto slang. It originally came from a drunken typo in the subject line of a 2013 Bitcoin forum post: “I AM HODLING”. (It should have read “holding.”)
HODL — usually pronounced “hoddle” — simply means to buy and hold for the long term, no matter what the market is doing. Bitcoin fans have even retroactively turned it into an acronym that stands for “hold on for dear life.”
The original forum post is riddled with typos, but the underlying message was prescient. At the time, Bitcoin’s value had plummeted from $1242 to $480 in a month. Panicked traders were bailing out, but GameKyuuubi — real name Mike, a programmer — wasn’t selling: “In a zero-sum game such as this,” he wrote, “traders can only take your money if you sell.”
The sentiment soon spread throughout the Bitcoin community and countless memes ensued. Crypto has experienced multiple bull and bear cycles, but so far at least, HODL has been good advice — with Bitcoin emerging as one of the best-performing assets of the last decade. (As mentioned in the FOMO entry above, one good way to HODL is via DCA.)
Memecoin
Dogecoin (DOGE) is the original memecoin — it’s literally a cryptocurrency based on a meme that was popular around the time it was invented. But in 2021, when Dogecoin dramatically rose in value, a huge wave of other tokens with absurd names emerged (in part made possible by decentralized exchanges like Sushiswap, which allow anyone to easily list a token). In May 2021, Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin donated more than $1 billion in DOGE-inspired memecoins like AKITA, SHIB, and Dogelon Mars (ELON) towards COVID-relief efforts in India and other causes. The coins had been deposited in Buterin’s crypto wallet in an attempt to make traders believe he was an investor.
Moon (or mooning)
When a cryptocurrency is seeing strong upward momentum, traders tend to describe it as going “to the moon” or “mooning.”
Pump and dump
A coordinated effort to artificially inflate the price of an asset and cash out before it tumbles back to earth. Cryptocurrencies with smaller market caps are particularly vulnerable to pump and dump schemes. A group of traders will work together to drive up the price of a specific small-cap altcoin. As prices rise, the schemers will promote the opportunity on Twitter, Reddit, Discord, Facebook, YouTube comments, and elsewhere, attracting more investors and driving the price up further. When the asset hit their target value, the original group will cash out — taking big profits and leaving everyone else “holding the bag” as the token collapses.
Whale
The biggest holders of crypto are known as whales. For Bitcoin, anyone with more than 1000 BTC is generally considered a whale. Unlike the vast majority of crypto traders, whales have the potential to move markets with their trades. As of mid-May 2021, the top 100 Bitcoin addresses (out of more than 800,000 active addresses) held more than 20 percent of all BTC according to bitinfocharts.com.
