HODL is probably the most famous and exclusively crypto slang, that made it to the mainstream. It literally means "holding" your crypto, i.e. "not selling".
In recent days it has been appropriated as an acronym for Hold On for Dear Life but in fact, it was born out of a simple mistake. Here's what actually happened...
Back in 2013 a user on the popular Bitcointalk forum was venting out his frustration about being a bad trader, and how he is now holding, because he missed his chance to sell before a massive crash in Bitcoin's price (one of many to come). Being a little drunk, the user known as GameKyuubi, miss-spelled "Holding" in the title of his post and the bitcoin community quickly picked it up, turning it into a meme. The term went viral and the rest is history.
We know that this was a genuine mistake, since the user did not use the term again in his actual post, but rather, spelt it correctly the second time around. He also admitted to be having some whiskey, which funny enough, he noticed was spelled differently on the bottle... Thus any speculation about the term being anything more than a simple misspell, is grossly exaggerated.
The post came at a time of a very bad Bitcoin crash from the then ATH of nearly $1200 all the way down to below $400 levels, a drop of more than 67% and it was the only post that brought a bit of fun to the community during those dark days, so it comes as no surprise that it made an impact and thus, a new slang was born. Today we see it used pretty much everywhere, even making its way into the US congress a few years back.
This is the link to the original post and you can have a ball with the comments too.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=375643.0
It's really a historical post that we now celebrate every year on this day (18-December).
