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Welcome to the Financial Times Lexicon

Browse thousands of words and phrases selected by Financial Times editors and suggest new terms for the glossary.

 

Term of the day

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a digital currency. Instead of printing banknotes, or minting coins, a list of the registration numbers of each of the "coins" is kept and a record of who owns them. People can pay one another by transferring the registration numbers online.

The creators of Bitcoin remain anonymous. The founder is supposedly called "Satoshi Nakamoto”, which is a Japanese name, but could be a person or people anywhere in the world. Whoever the founders were, they mistrusted government enough to set up a...

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