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Glossary of Tezos terms
An account is a special case of a contract, one that has no associated program. An account has a manager and a balance.
The alphanet is a Tezos testnet, a network of nodes and clients used just for testing. Accounts in the alphanet get free tez at creation and can get more via a faucet mechanism.
Baking is the process where nodes in the network construct new blocks in the chain. It's roughly the same as mining in other systems, but there is (almost) no proof-of-work involved. Rights to bake are granted ahead of time to baking nodes probabilistically in proportion to their stake (how much tez is delegated to them).
Every contract has a balance, the amount of tez that it owns. Unlike bitcoin, Tezos has no concept like UXTOs. Instead, Tezos maintains state for each contract including the contract's current balance.
The betanet is a network operating as a stepping stone to deployment of the full Tezos mainnet. The Tezos Foundation says that transactions in the betanet will persist into the mainnet. Accounts in the betanet get an initial balance per the recommendation of the fundraiser, but the account owner must verify KYC info to obtain a necessary activation code.
Tezos blocks follow the usual blockchain pattern of grouping sets of operations (transactions, contract originations, contract execution, endorsements, etc) into chunks that are added to the continuously growing blockchain. Each block cryptographically signed by its baker and refers to its predecessor in the blockchain.
Client is the general term for a Tezos application that interacts with the nodes. It may generate and manage keys; create and submit operations to the nodes; and query the data from the nodes. The standard Tezos core code includes a tezos-client command line application written in Ocaml and built alongside the core tezos-node program for the node. Custom clients can be developed in any language that provides the necessary cryptographic libraries. Clients communicate with nodes via the node's RPC interface.
See public key.
See public key hash.
Tez are the native tezos tokens, as allocated by the fundraiser and earned by baking and endorsing. The symbol XTZ means the same thing, as does the ꜩ glyph when accompanying a number.