Bitcoin is Stupid and Does Not Deserve an Emoji
thedabbler.patatas.ca

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

F that

  • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    251·
    5 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
      201·
      5 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.

        • Scrollone@feddit.itEnglish
          12·
          5 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@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            4·
            5 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.eeEnglish
        71·
        5 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
          12·
          5 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
        34·
        5 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.brEnglish
      76·
      5 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.brEnglish
          23·
          5 months ago

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

          • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            5 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@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              2·
              5 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.worldEnglish
                1·
                5 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.