What does HODL mean?

Bullish, 'to the moon', and FOMO. Once you have dipped your toe in the crypto-pool, certain terms and phrases cannot be avoided. But there is one word that is used more frequently, a word that has made quite some impact and is even being printed on t-shirts. I’m of course talking about HODL.

The famous typo

But what does HODL actually mean? To be honest, it’s nothing more than a typo for the world hold. In the context of cryptocurrency, HODLING your coins translates directly to holding your coins. There are countless stories of people selling their crypto and having regrets further down the road. So a certain sentiment has developed, where the best strategy was to simply HODL onto your coins. One would only need one glance at the price-history of Bitcoin itself, to re-establish this sentiment.

The origin

But where does the term HODL actually come from? What is the origin? To put it bluntly, HODL is nothing more than the ramblings of a drunk trader. In 2013, user GameKyuubi logged into the Bitcointalk forum and created the following thread with the title 'I AM HODLING':

Yep, that’s the reason behind HODL… We are going to take a wild guess here and say that not even GameKyuubi himself could have predicted the impact this post would have on the industry. It's also an example of the historic importance of the BitcoinTalk, where more important crypto events took place in the past. Hopefully, we will see more of these in the future!