35 crypto companies got together to make a change dot org petition called “Bitcoin Deserves an Emoji”.

F that

  • Chozo@fedia.io
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    3 months ago

    I don’t mind there being an emoji for cryptocurrency. It’s a relevant thing in modern society whether we like it or not, so there’s no reason it should be excluded. But just not Bitcoin, specifically. Even though Bitcoin is the one that kicked off crypto, it’s still a brand name, which would result in auto-rejection according to the Unicode Consortium’s guidelines.

    If there was a more general-purpose icon/symbol that could represent cryptocurrency in general, that’d be more appropriate. But it can’t be Bitcoin.

      • Zetta@mander.xyz
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        3 months ago

        I mean it has its issues but a non regulated currency not controlled by a government is cool imo

        • RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          3 months ago

          Its supposed benefits are vastly overshadowed by their only practical application: allowing online crime to flourish.

        • lad@programming.dev
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          3 months ago

          The main issue is that it tries to fix government trust issues with private actors trust issues. It’s still trust issues

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I wouldn’t think Bitcoin has, or can, be trademarked or copyrighted, as it is an open-source protocol/technology where even the creator is unknown?

      Either way there isn’t a generic symbol for cryptocurrency. This emoji will go the way of the save icon, where in a couple generations most people will have no idea what it relates to, but know that it’s a symbol for cryptos.

      • Chozo@fedia.io
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        3 months ago

        I wouldn’t think Bitcoin has, or can, be trademarked or copyrighted, as it is an open-source protocol/technology where even the creator is unknown?

        It’s still the name of a specific product/service. The issue is partly trademark/copyright, but also partly a matter of neutrality. The Unicode Consortium want to ensure that they’re not directly or indirectly endorsing any specific products. If they added a Bitcoin logo, then you’d see every other crypto lining up to get their logos permanently installed on every person’s devices, too. Free advertising for life on 99.99% of phones would be hard to pass up.

        • ricecake
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          3 months ago

          I mean, we have a symbol for effectively any currency that anyone can or wants to fill out the paperwork for and can demonstrate the basics of “this is a meaningful symbol with more than transient relevance”.

          They added ₿ in 2016.

          https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/category/Sc

          • Scrollone@feddit.it
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            3 months ago

            So, if there’s already a symbol in Unicode, the petition doesn’t make any sense. They should ask Google and Apple to display the symbol in the emoji list, with a control character to force it as emoji.

            • ricecake
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              3 months ago

              Totally. It’s double weird, because it’s not a petitionable issue, it’s a form where you make your case and a committee decides, and they already have the symbol and they just seem to want it to be usable like 💲, which isn’t a thing.

        • beeb@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          Surely the Tokyo tower is a specific product then? 🗼It costs money to visit, aren’t the other towers jealous?

          • magic_lobster_party@kbin.run
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            3 months ago

            https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#Faulty_Comparison

            The Tokyo Tower🗼(a specific building) does not justify adding the Eiffel Tower.

            Many historical emoji violate current factors for inclusion. Once an emoji is encoded it cannot be removed from the Unicode Standard.

            It was added when Unicode Consortium had different guidelines. They don’t accept specific buildings anymore.

            Under automatically declined:

            Specific buildings, structures, landmarks, or other locations, whether fictional, historic, or modern.

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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          3 months ago

          It’s a specific type of thing, but it’s not a brand. Nobody owns the trademark for Bitcoin. Anyone can buy, sell, or mine Bitcoin. It’s no more a specific product than dollars are a specific product.

          If they added a Bitcoin logo, then you’d see every other crypto lining up to get their logos permanently installed on every person’s devices, too.

          Is there a problem with that? This isn’t “advertising”, these are unicode symbols. There are unicode symbols for all kinds of things. Every currency has unicode symbols, why not cryptocurrencies?

      • Phen@lemmy.eco.br
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        3 months ago

        The creator of bitcoin is as unknown as batman’s identity. The folks at the center of the main blockchain companies and stuff like that all know pretty well who created it, they just play along with the story.

          • Phen@lemmy.eco.br
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            3 months ago

            Oh, there is. But while they keep this game up, there’s still plausible deniability for everything.

            • dhork@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              If whoever invented Bitcoin is still on this earth, they have a bit of a conundrum. Since we can track all transactions, and we know roughly how long Satoshi was mining the first bitcoins before other people got involved, those early accounts are sitting on over 1 million BTC. Even after today’s dump, that’s still over $50 billion. And for reference, the Koch family is 25th on Forbe’s infamous list, estimated to be worth about $56B. So that person is one of the richest people on the planet.

              However, those coins continue to remain unspent. And once they are moved in any transaction, the entire world will know. That leads to an inherent assumption that those 1M coins (out of 21M that can ever exist) must be irretrievably lost (due to their private keys being deleted), so most have taken that out of the active supply when estimating BTC value. Once they are moved, the price will probably crash – at least 5%, but more likely much more than that. He is among the richest people in the world on paper, but if he moves any of it his wealth will collapse.

              However, one doesn’t have to move coins to prove they own them. Anyone with the private keys could cryptographically sign a message saying “I am Satoshi” with one of the early keys and immediately have 100% credibility. The fact that this hasn’t happened means that those keys likely not longer exist. (I, personally, think Hal Finney took those keys to the grave with him, and Craig Wright is a big fat liar.)

              • AlDente
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                3 months ago

                No single wallet has even close to 1 million Bitcoins. It’s a public block chain and you can find a list of the largest wallets in a website like this: https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html

                Also, regarding the unfair advantage of the genesis block, Bitcoin’s code was actually written in a way that prevents this balance from being transfered. It’s forever locked in the wallet at this address: 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa.

                • dhork@lemmy.world
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                  3 months ago

                  True, the Genesis Block is fixed, but it’s speculated that Satoshi did most of the mining during Bitcoin’s initial experiment. I have seen estimates online that the first 22k blocks were mined almost exclusively by Satoshi, all to different BTC addresses, 50 BTC each. Worth practically nothing back then but worth over 2.5M today. Every 10 minutes or so, Satoshi found another one.

    • magic_lobster_party@kbin.run
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      3 months ago

      The problem with having cryptocurrency as emoji is agreeing on the specification how it should be drawn, and also make it different enough from already existing emojis such as coin 🪙. It is not exactly a tangible thing.

      • Corkyskog
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        3 months ago

        Just make it the B symbol they use in the coin? None of the others would exist in their current fashion, without Bitcoin anyway.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          3 months ago

          Bitcoin is a brand name there which means they can’t do that. Also if bitcoin deserves its own symbol (and I don’t think it necessarily does) then all the cryptocurrencies such as ethereum also deserve one.

        • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          3 months ago

          Windows wouldn’t have existed without DOS so it’s logo should be the DOS logo. Likewise the USD emoji should be a pile of gold. \s

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Why in the world would you have “emojis” as part of Unicode anyway?

      We already have a way to have endless “emojis” without administrative stupidity, it’s called JPEG.

      If you need to show text as that, we’ve had smileys since 90s.

      • xthexder@l.sw0.com
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        3 months ago

        Would you rather send an entire JPEG over text message for an emoji? Or just 4 bytes of unicode right inline where you want it? Unicode having a standard set of emoji is actually incredibly useful and reduces complexity. I guess it would disincentivize 👏 emoji 👏 spam 👏 to use JPEGs tho.

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          I’d send :-} and :-\ and =P and D= instead of an emoji. As the founding fathers intended.

          • xthexder@l.sw0.com
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            3 months ago

            There’s even more use cases that come up, like being able to use emoji and other fancy symbols anywhere unicode is supported. So you can even program with them. People have taken that idea to the extreme just for fun: https://www.emojicode.org/

            • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              Other special symbols are a different thing. For APL language or others.

              They are useful, provided you have them on your keyboard or you have configurable extra keys.

              Symbols specifically for emoji - I mean, people can do what they want with code space, even if I’d rather see another obscure alphabet standardized there. Medieval Armenian or Russian musical notation, for example. Something real .

      • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        Hmm, why do we need a corporation to be arbitter of the written language anyway ? If they want to use it, they should just use it.If they can’t because of some central authority then Unicode is is to be abolished and replace with a system where you can usev wherever squiggle that you want and nobody gets a second opinion. You just do it.

    • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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      3 months ago

      I don’t think it should have an emoji either, but how does this rule apply to real currencies being emojis? I mean there is dollar banknote 💵 and yen banknote 💴 and euro banknote 💶 as separate emojis, not just a general money one. And honestly, even most of the emojis referencing anything that has to do with money uses dollar signs, i.e. $. Were these rules made after these emojis were already added?

      • Chozo@fedia.io
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        3 months ago

        I saw this get brought up a lot. I think the difference is that currency symbols generally don’t refer to a specific currency. USD and AUS both use the $ symbol, for example. “Dollar” and “American Dollar” aren’t the same thing since other types of dollars exist, and the symbols are still technically multi-purpose, whereas the ₿ symbol technically refers only to Bitcoin.

        That’s my theory on the reasoning, at least.

    • qaz@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      It makes a lot more sense to implement this the way country flags are implemented in Unicode.