Finance for Humans
The Crypto Quiz! (Part 1!)
How well do you know crypto terms? Test your skills, grill your Zoommates, and become a world-champion cryptographer with our first ever crypto quiz.
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Hodl on to your wallets, there’s a blockchain flippening on the way! (Are we doing this right?)
You may know about cryptocurrency. And if you do, you may be a little freaked out by how strange and it all seems. It even kind of has a language all its own. To help you discern your satoshi from your DeFi so you can impress all your friends at your next Zoom cocktail party, where you can’t even tell if anyone can hear you because it’s Zoom, we’ve devised this crypto-term quiz. We promise, it’s easy. Or our name isn’t Mt. Gox.
1. To Hodl means...
a. The act of coming together with a group of friends, usually on a football field, draping arms around each other, discussing how you’re going to spend your crypto.
b. When you eat a just-boiled noodle and try to say “hot noodle” with a burning mouth full of pasta and it comes out “hodl.”
c. A term that means you’re “holding” your crypto instead of selling it. But spelled wrong because someone wrote “I AM HODLING” on a message board in 2013 and the internet loves an inside joke.
d. A city in Arizona where it’s illegal to spend crypto on livestock purchases.
2. A Wallet is...
a. A folded piece of leather or a vegan imitation leather where you store a tiny piece of (usually laminated) paper with your Bitcoin password along with a 2009 receipt for frozen yogurt.
b. The place you keep your crypto. Not an actual wallet; a piece of software (like everything). Think of it like the address where your bitcoin (or Ethereum, etc.) lives.
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c. Contrary to what it sounds like, this is a type of fish native to the Pacific Northwest (it has super sharp teeth) and the name of a local altcoin in the region.
d. This is a digital pocketbook containing one’s defunct crypto, bookmarks for websites that no longer exist, old Hotmail passwords, and all of the photos you’ve deleted from Facebook in the past 17 years.
3. The Cold Storage is...
a. Somewhere in the valley, there’s an underground bunker the size of a Walmart supercenter, kept at Arctic temperatures, in which all of the crypto servers are preserved for the coming apocalypse.
b. A digital place of exile, similar to Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, where users who’ve committed crypto fraud are sent to think about what they’ve done.
c. If a wallet is the digital address where you keep crypto, this is like a wallet you keep in a safe deposit box. Cold Storage is digital but it’s not connected to the internet, so none of the very creepy people you hear about sniffing around crypto can get to it.
d. Bulk chest freezers, purchased in hopes that a coming shortage will turn out in your favor. Usually around the holidays, the event is referred to by crypto-rati as the Black Friday Sub Zero Short-Sell Freakout.
4. A Satoshi is...
a. The name of a famous artist known for transcribing the day’s crypto exchange rates onto thousands of individual grains of rice. Often sold at local fairs.
b. A rare Pokémon that, when discovered on Pokémon Go, provides a player with a code to redeem five Pokécoin, which you can redeem for one stuffed animal.
c. The code name for a conspiracy that revolves around an unproduced sequel to Bridget Jones’s Diary that takes place in 2099, funded entirely by crypto and starring animatronic wallabies.
d. A satoshi, named for the mysterious inventor of bitcoin, is the smallest unit of a bitcoin — one 100 millionth of a unit.
5. A Blockchain is...
a. A community of local users who combine their crypto to fund city-related projects that have been postponed by bureaucracy. Past blockchains have done things like installed bidets in all municipal facilities.
b. It’s like a big spreadsheet, shared by multiple users, that records everything super securely. Every time it gets updated with a new transaction (also called a block), everyone sees the change, and it gets added to the sheet (or chain).
c. A spree of online purchases using crypto, usually taking place between one and three a.m. on Etsy, Wayfair, and wackyinflatables.com.
d. An additional software that protects your crypto from “chains” — infectious viruses that transform crypto into actual money, which is no fun.
6. DeFi means...
a. A Toronto-based metal band that sings about “crypto,” a mythical creature that serves as a metaphor for capitalism.
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b. Stands for “decomposing fish”
c. Stands for Devin Fillmoe. A famous user who forgot he had crypto and moved on with his life.
d. Shorthand for “decentralized finance,” it’s an emerging world of financial applications and services open to everyone, so you don’t have to trust a middleman, like a bank or a guy named Bryce.
How did you do? If you passed (or even if you failed), take the second part of our crypto terminology quiz here!
Answer Key: 1. c, 2. b, 3. c, 4. d, 5. b, 6. d
Written By
Alex Beggs
Alex Beggs is the senior staff writer at Bon Appétit. She only plays with Monopoly money.
