Glossary

51% Attack

The ability of someone controlling a majority of the network to revise transaction history and prevent new transactions from confirming.

Block Height

The number of blocks preceding a particular block on a block chain. For example, the genesis block has a height of zero because zero blocks preceded it.

Block Sequence Number

Integer that denotes the position of a given block within the collection of blocks that form of the blockchain. Block sequences increment by 1 for each block and start at 0 for the genesis block.

Distribution Addresses

The genesis block of 100 million coins is split up to 100 addresses of 1m each. The recipient addresses of these 100m are called distribution addresses.

Droplet

A droplet is the smallest unit of Skycoin, equal to 0.000001 Skycoin (SKY).

Head Block

The block in the blockchain with highest sequence number. In other words, the most recent block added to the blockchain.

Private Key

The private portion of a keypair which can create signatures that other people can verify using the public key. Skycoin uses ECDSA keys with the secp256k1 curve.

Public Key

The public portion of a keypair which can be used to verify signatures made with the private portion of the keypair. Skycoin uses ECDSA keys with the secp256k1 curve.

Transaction

A transaction spends one or more outputs and creates one or more new outputs. The outputs that are spent by the transaction are called "transaction inputs".