Bitcoin is Stupid and Does Not Deserve an Emoji (blog post)

smallpatatas@lemm.ee to Technology@lemmy.world – 707 points –
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35 crypto companies got together to make a change dot org petition called "Bitcoin Deserves an Emoji".

F that

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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.

They already have that, 💩

💩🪙

Poopmoon?

Its a coin emoji, but its one of those emoji that get rendered wildly different depending on which device (and software version) you’re viewing it on

Hah, poop coin! For me it's like realistic moon without face, just like Samsung quality moon photo.

an emoji for cryptocurrency

💩🪙

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

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

Criminals use what works. So therefore that means that crypto actually does its job as a real currency that cannot be controlled. Criminals also have a habit of using auto mobiles, guns, computers, shoes, etc.

If criminals only used cars from brand X and nobody else used brand X, it would be viewed the same.

There are plenty of currencies out there, which normal people use. Cryptocurrencies are mainly used by criminals though.

Chain analysis companies whose whole reason for existing is selling exchanges and governments software to track illicit cryptocurrency transactions show that less than 1% of transactions are illicit in nature. So I don't know how that means the majority of crypto is used for illicit finance.

Had to go out and find a source myself.

https://www.europol.europa.eu/cms/sites/default/files/documents/Europol%20Spotlight%20-%20Cryptocurrencies%20-%20Tracing%20the%20evolution%20of%20criminal%20finances.pdf

Private companies say less than 1%. Academia says around 20%. That's a huge difference to only cite one side of the story.

That's a good point. It's pretty safe to assume that private companies would want to downplay it as much as possible and academia for governments and shit would want to play it up as much as possible. So the real number probably truly lies somewhere in between those two.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ drug users gotta get their drugs

I suppose you don't use cash then. Come on, there is almost no online crime anyway

I can buy almost everything with cash but with shitcoins I can only pay ransom. And the FBI probably won't agree there's virtually no online crime.

Semi-legal activities such as donating to wanted individuals, purchasing non regulated non illegal to ship medicine, purchasing digital goods (such as commissioned art) from countries that were banned by SWIFT (Russia).

I’ve already paid a lot of legal things and donated a lot with crypto. It’s pretty much the only way to pay online without giving away your personal info

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Thanks for the explanation

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?

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.

if this is true, there would be some evidence

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

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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/

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 .

How aren't emoji "real"?

This just comes across as "old man yells at cloud" to me tbh.

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.

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