Bitcoin has since its inception defied clear definition. This is a consequence of the heavily overloaded use of the term. The term was coined by Satoshi in Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, as a label for the essential concepts. It was later used also for the prototype implementation, a chain (history) of transaction confirmation, a set of consensus rules that constrain a chain, a unit of the coin, and a vaguely-bounded community of people.

While there is only one set of concepts, each of the other contexts has any number of possible variations consistent with them. There are many implementations (of the prototype and otherwise), consensus rules have deviated (in the prototype and in other implementations), history is dynamic and arbitrary (even the prototype-encoded genesis block could have been different without consequence), and each coin manifests an independent set of units and is supported by its own set of adherents.

For these reasons Bitcoin is used herein as a label for Cryptodynamic Principles. Implementations are referred to by their brands, such as "Bitcoin Core" or "Libbitcoin"; chains are referred to by the trading symbols in common use, such as "BTC" and "LTC"; consensus rules for a given chain are referred to in the context of the trading symbol, such at "LTC consensus rules"; a unit of coin is referred to in the lower case of the trading symbol, such as "btc" or "ltc" (a refinement of the ambiguous convention of using lower case "bitcoin" to refer to a unit of "BTC"); and communities are referred to as either "Bitcoin community" (generally) or "BTC community" (specifically).

While maximalists may reject the use "Bitcoin" as a conceptual label, associating it instead with a history, the term was coined in relation to a set of principles and continues to apply to them. Furthermore there are multiple instances of independent chains that adhere to those principles, making the history-based label ambiguous. Due to this ambiguity people have naturally adopted the convention of referring to histories unambiguously by way of trading symbols.