this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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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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[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

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 22 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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 4 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Thanks for the explanation

[–] [email protected] -1 points 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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

if this is true, there would be some evidence

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

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 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago

if you can't present evidence, then you're just spreading uncertainty and doubt.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Satoshi Nakamoto is some kind of consipracy...?

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf