HODL
 Image: original illustration, memecoin.wiki | |
| part of speech | verb and noun |
|---|---|
| origin | bitcointalk post, December 18, 2013 |
| coined by | GameKyuubi |
HODL is crypto's ur term for refusing to sell, born as a drunken misspelling of hold in a December 2013 bitcointalk forum post by user GameKyuubi titled I AM HODLING.
HODL is crypto's oldest and most famous piece of slang, meaning to hold an asset through volatility and refuse to sell. It began as a typo and became a philosophy, later backfitted with the backronym "hold on for dear life." Every subsequent generation of holding vocabulary, including paper hands and diamond hands, descends from it.
Origin
On December 18, 2013, with Bitcoin crashing, a bitcointalk forum user named GameKyuubi posted a thread titled "I AM HODLING." The first sentence acknowledged the mistake: "I type d that tyitle twice because I knew it was wrong the first time." The author admitted to drinking whiskey and to being a bad trader, which was exactly the point of the post: because he knew he could not time the market, the only rational move was to hold and let better traders fight over the swings. The thread was mocked, then memed, then canonized; it remains live on bitcointalk with thousands of replies, and the word entered the permanent vocabulary of the industry within months.
Usage
HODL functions as a verb ("just hodl"), a noun ("my hodl bag"), and an identity ("hodler"). In Bitcoin culture it is close to a moral position, the retail investor's defense against panic, and it anchors the long game ethos captured by the related coinage hodlers versus traders. Commentators have noted the irony that the term was born from an admission of trading incompetence rather than conviction, which arguably makes it more honest than its later mythology.
In the trenches
Meme coin culture inherited the word but inverted its economics. In the trenches, where most tokens trend to zero, unconditional hodling is usually a losing strategy, and the term is often deployed ironically, as when a rug pull victim announces they are still hodling. The sincere version survives in cult coin communities, which treat refusing to sell as the whole strategy, and in the standing joke that a trench trader's longest term holds are the ones they forgot to sell (see bag and roundtrip).
References
- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=375643.0
- https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2019/02/02/the-history-of-hodl
- https://www.citadel21.com/bitcointalk-chronicles-the-origin-of-hodl
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cryptocurrency/hodlers-began-hodling-bitcoin-12-years-ago-iconic-whisky-fuelled-investment-strategy-would-have-turned-usd523-into-over-usd87-000-a-16-666-percent-gain
- https://www.bitstamp.net/en-gb/learn/crypto-101/hodl-meaning/
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