The Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) is U.S. legislation aimed toward preventing criminals from using financial institutions to hide or launder money. Among other things, the law requires financial institutions to provide documentation to regulators whenever their clients deal with suspicious cash transactions involving sums over $10,000.
Read moreThe Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) is the primary global standard setter for the prudential regulation of banks. The mandate of the BCBS is to strengthen the regulation, supervision, and practices of banks/financial institutions worldwide with the purpose of enhancing financial stability. The BCBS does not possess any formal supranational authority. There is no…
Read moreA billing descriptor is the way a company’s name appears on a credit or debit card statement. The descriptor is set up when the merchant account is established, and is used by the credit card customer to identify the recipient of a given payment.
Read moreBEP is short for Binance Chain Evolution Proposal. In short, BEP is a list of token management rules and pre-defined criteria to help launch on-chain assets on Binance Chain. Projects use this BEP to transition their tokens from their original mainnet to the Binance Chain. Often, this is done to take advantage of Binance’s speed,…
Read moreThe term “Bitcoin” can either refer to Bitcoin the network, or bitcoin the digital currency. Bitcoin (the digital currency) does not exist in physical form, is not issued or backed by a country’s central bank or government, and relies on cryptographic technology (thus also called crypto-currency). You can earn bitcoin by trading for goods or…
Read moreA bitcoin address is a unique cryptographic key that “owns” bitcoins and is associated with a public/private key pair. The private key is kept secret and is used to sign a transaction hash, which authorizes the spending of coins it controls, so that everyone on the Bitcoin network can verify that the person transferring the…
Read moreA business that operates physical kiosks that allow a person to purchase bitcoin by using cash or a debit card. Some Bitcoin ATMs offer bi-directional functionality enabling both the purchase of bitcoin as well as the sale of bitcoin for cash. In some cases, Bitcoin ATM providers require users to have an existing account to…
Read moreA fork occurs when enacting a new set of rules. A hard fork is a permanent change/divergence in the blockchain protocol and is not backwards compatible. This means that nodes that haven’t upgraded can’t validate blocks that have been created by upgraded nodes which follow newer consensus rules. A good example of a Bitcoin hard…
Read moreA Bitcoin wallet is a physical device or software program that stores the private key (secret number) for every Bitcoin address in the Bitcoin wallet of the person who owns the funds. Some of the most popular Bitcoin wallets are desktop, mobile application, and hardware wallets.
Read moreBlocks hold batches of valid transactions that are hashed and encoded into a Merkle tree. Each new block includes the cryptographic hash of the prior block in the blockchain, linking the two. The linked blocks form a chain. This iterative process confirms the integrity of the previous block, all the way back to the original…
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