Short reminder that Bitcoin was created as a reaction on the wirld finance crisis and to allow people like Assange to receive donations, because PayPal and similar just blocked them...
That does not mean that Botcoin is perfect, but: If the alternative system was perfect, there was not bitcoin.
We also need a McDonald’s emoji, Pepsi emoji, Windows emoji and Mastercard emoji. These are also brands that are heavily ingrained in our culture. Probably even more so than Bitcoin.
Or we accept that brands like Bitcoin shouldn’t use emoji as a marketing tool.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
fighting for bitcoin to get an emoji is stupid, but fighting against it might be even stupider. surely there are more important things to spend your time and energy on. it's a fucking emoji. who cares?
normalizing scams, by laundering their image via standards organizations, pollutes our communications environment. Both an emoji and a petition are symbolic - and our symbols are in fact important.
Bitcoin isn't a scam. All non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies are scams.
People often hear about stuff like coins that are pre-mined, or proof-of-stake and the schemes and scans that come out of those, and immediately associate Bitcoin with the same thing.
I loved the concept at first, the idea of a decentralized currency all handled by encryption, and transactions permamently stored in a public ledger for all to see.
Then the cryptobros and the scammers caught wind of it and it's all downhill from there.
If you want the name of a payment techology that isn't snake oil, isn't blockchain-based, isn't a cult, doesn't claim to be a currency, doesn't work on proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, but actually does provide certain privacy guarantees for your basic purchasing needs, is cryptographically secure, and can be used with only FOSS, I recommend looking into GNU Taler.
The only downside is that it's not really supported anywhere at all yet. But I do hope it becomes a real thing some day.
Scammers use the technology because it actually works and does what it says it does. And criminals and scammers and such are generally the first ones to adopt a new technology. Such as bank robbers adopting the automobile in order to get away faster.
Bitcoin is stupid, but the point of Unicode is that we have a symbol for everything that has a commonly recognized symbol or representative value, or even uncommonly recognized.
If ⅌ gets a character, or all the symbols of the Byzantine musical notation system, I'm not sure why a typically recognized symbol for a cryptocurrency shouldn't.
The weird bit is that they put together a petition. All you really need to do is submit a proposal and show that it's a notable symbol and not owned by anyone in particular or a brand icon.
There really isn't a difference between a character and an emoji beyond an emoji being a stylized rendering of a character, or a character whose use is intended as a pictograph.
They're all just Unicode code points, although I suppose there's some distinction between the characters with more context specific meaning or the ones that are more apt to modification a la 🧑⚕️👩🏿⚕️. But you've also got 💲 and $, where "bold dollar sign" is often represented as green, but "dollar sign" tends to be represented in contextual style. Is ☣ a character or an emoji? What about the thousands of "other symbols" as defined by the Unicode spec which may or may not have special character renderings depending on your platform and font?
And yeah, I didn't know that character existed, so now it's doubly confusing why anyone is asking for anything. The symbol has meaning, and it's in the big book of meaningful symbols. Not sure what more they want.
Bitcoin has the right idea, but did not execute it properly, primarily because it was the first and technology has improved and it has not. Monero is actually doing what bitcoin was meant to do and acting as a transactional currency, medium of exchange, and store of value.
Look at my totally stable store of currency bro, trust me bro, this is totally useful as a means of exchange and you can trust in its future value bro, just believe me.
Now, overlay that price chart with a transaction count chart averaged out over say 90 days and what you will notice is that big spike up to 400 and above was at basically no transaction volume which makes it seem more like that was hype. Looking at the price chart over shorter timeframes such as a year will show you that the transaction count is actually increasing now and the price is staying quite stable.
Monero will not scale. All attempts at "improved" altcoins have just sacrificed scalability in exchange for features that look good in the short term to investors that don't know any better.
There are people dedicated specifically to Monero scaling and they are a hell of a lot smarter than me and do not see any reason why it cannot be scaled properly. Look at some talks by Articmine