Glossary: record what was excluded, and decide on 15 borderline terms

[HodlDee]

Summary

The work described here is on the local branch glossary-in-house (3 commits), not yet pushed.

The glossary is now written in-house — 238 terms in build/glossary.mjs, rendered at build time, no external dependency. The old source carried 514 entries. This issue records what was deliberately left out, so the decision is written down rather than implied by absence, and lists the handful worth reconsidering.

Why the counts are not comparable

The 514 was padded. Bucketing the 276 entries not carried across:

Bucket	Count	Examples
Market and dashboard metrics	120	200-week moving average, realized cap, NVT ratio, btc_per_person, epoch_coins_left, blocks_until_retarget
Meme, ideology, near-duplicate, or covered in substance	172	lambo, zuckbucks, laser eyes, Austrian Economics, Just-World Fallacy, Double Spend Problem and Double-Spending Problem
Altcoin, Lightning, deprecated BIP, out of scope	71	ethereum, zk_rollup, lnurl, BIP-70 (payment protocol, deprecated)
Worth a second look	15	listed below

Buckets overlap where an entry matched more than one rule, so the numbers do not sum to 276.

Most of the metrics bucket looks like it came from a dashboard rather than a glossary — epoch_coins_left and blocks_until_retarget are readouts, not vocabulary.

The editorial line taken

Define the vocabulary these guides actually use, and define it the way this site would. Leave out trading metrics, price speculation, meme vocabulary, altcoins, and ideology. A glossary attached to guides about protecting savings has no business defining "lambo" or the 200-week moving average.

This is a judgement, not a fact, and it is the thing to disagree with if you are going to disagree with something.

Worth a second look

Genuinely missing, plausibly in scope, roughly in priority order:

• Miner — mining is defined, the actor is not
• Fork — soft_fork and hard_fork are defined; the general term is not
• Electrum — named in several guides, including as the most impersonated wallet in bitcoin
• P2PK — the original output type; historical, and it explains why P2PKH exists
• Timechain — used in bitcoin writing often enough that a reader will meet it
• Zero-knowledge proof — appears in the glossary page's own hero copy ("from addresses and air gaps to xpubs and zero-knowledge proofs")
• BIP-37 — bloom filters; bloom_filter is defined, the BIP number is not
• BIP-143 — the SegWit signature scheme that made input values available to signers, which is what psbt and air-gapped-psbt-workflow rest on
• BIP-112 / BIP-113 — the rest of the timelock set alongside BIP-65 and BIP-68
• Uncensorable / Unconfiscatable / Unpermissioned — adjectives more than terms; include only if the tone fits
• Long-term holder / Just-in-time — market vocabulary; probably out

Zero-knowledge proof is the one I would fix regardless — the glossary page's own lead sentence promises it.

Not asking for a decision on the rest

The 120 metrics, 172 meme/ideology and 71 out-of-scope entries are not proposed for inclusion. If any specific one is wanted, it is a line in build/glossary.mjs rather than a project.

Licensing note

All 238 definitions are original prose, published under CC BY 4.0 with the rest of the site's writing and recorded in LICENSING.md. The old source states no licence at all, which is why its text could not be carried across even where the coverage overlapped. Similarity was checked across all 121 entries whose ids overlapped: six shared a five-word run, three were reworded, and the four remaining are unavoidable phrasings such as "one hundred millionth of a bitcoin".