coin

Phonetic: /kɔɪn/

Part of Speech: noun

Category: web3, finance

Broadly used to refer to digital assets of some kind, usually fungible and of a significant volume. The term is often combined with others to denote the type of coin in question, e.g. memecoin, stablecoin.

Definition source: Education DAO - mapachurro

Sample sentence

When I was a kid, we didn't always have enough money for big birthday presents or even groceries, but that all changed when Mom got in on the ground floor of Fartcoin.

Additional definitions

A cryptocurrency or digital cash that is independent of any other platform, which is used as exchange of value.

Source

Extended definition

The term 'coin' has some nuances. Strictly speaking, a 'coin' could be defined as: A fungible token (all of them identical) issued on a blockchain, either as the network's transactional, or gas, token, or through a smart contract deployed to that network. Some people may use 'coins' as shorthand for 'bitcoin'; the immortal aphorism 'not your keys, not your coins' refers to bitcoins. Another thing to keep in mind is that, while coins are put forward as some sort of representation of value, that value can vary wildly from one 'coin' to another. A coin may represent the value of the computational resources of the network, or it may be 'pegged' to represent fiat currency value, or it may float according to the value placed on immaterial resources like NFTs, membership, or digital goods, to name a few.

This word came from... the ether

Date first recorded: 2025-01-31

Commentary

From the Bitcoin whitepaper, under heading 2, 'Transactions': 'We define an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures. Each owner transfers the coin to the next by digitally signing a hash of the previous transaction and the public key of the next owner and adding these to the end of the coin. A payee can verify the signatures to verify the chain of ownership.' Interestingly, this gets oddly close to the term 'isnad' in Arabic, referring to 'a chain of (authoritative) transmission'.

Regardless, this definition marks a first iteration of the concept of 'electronic coin'. However, no term exists in a vacuum, devoid of context. The word 'coin' already existed, and of course, the term 'bitcoin' itself is a portmanteau, a neologism seeking to express the concept of money being inextricably tied to a digital, computer-based system. Like any portmanteau, though (think of a large leather trunk you can shove stuff in), it literally carries its baggage with it. So bitcoin puts this term out in the world, and they attempt to define it based on a fairly strict definition of a string of signatures and authority based on transfers on a proof-of-work public blockchain network. Unfortunately for purists, this definition is not intuitively carried in the everyday meaning and usage of 'coin', although the concept of 'electronic coin' was easy enough to grasp.

As a result, people almost immediately began re-shortening 'bitcoin' to just 'coin', such as in the concept of 'colored coins', cited in the first paragraph of the subsequent Ethereum whitepaper. In that same paper, Vitalik Buterin re-glosses 'bitcoins' as 'technically, 'unspent transaction outputs' or UTXO that have been minted and not yet spent, with each UTXO having a denomination and an owner (defined by a 20-byte address which is essentially a cryptographic public key)'. Glad we cleared that up.

Once Vitalik begins discussing Ethereum, however, mentions of 'coin' almost completely cease; he introduces the concept of 'ether', and defines it as 'the main internal crypto-fuel of Ethereum, and is used to pay transaction fees.' Full stop; he moves on then to discuss account types.

It is clear that what is being introduced in this whitepaper is not simply a fork of Bitcoin or an iteration on it, but something else. Tokens, for their part, are essentially never defined in the whitepaper as such. The concept appears to be assumed as understood by some inherent meaning.

There is a strong tradition within the crypto world to refer to 'anything that's not Bitcoin' as 'an altcoin'; we also have terms like 'shitcoin' and 'stablecoin' and 'memecoin' and all the rest. Looking at this historical development of the technology and its definitions, it would be tempting to concede the point to Bitcoin originalists that 'coin' refers to Bitcoin only, and nothing else. Such a concession would, however, engage with a conception of the world in which the word 'coin' did not exist prior to 2008.

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