Bitcoin deserves the right symbol | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin deserves the right symbol

bitcoinsymbol.org

67 pointstarball39 comments

$ is used to represent dozens of local "dollars", not just USD. That's why you use "USD" when specificity matters. There's nothing wrong with "BTC" when you need to type something out about Bitcoin. Specialized symbols in font is not a scalable solution...

Yep for example the US dollar symbol is also used for the Mexican peso and Canadian dollar. To differentiate they simply use codes i.e. US, CAN, MXN where context is needed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_sign

... Which once led an intern to submit an expense report for me for USD $2,800 for a dinner in Guadalajara. After a stern talking-to by accounting I did the rest of my receipts myself.

Unfortunately that ship has sailed. The B with the two vertical lines through it (akin to the dollar sign) is "the Bitcoin symbol", no matter what other kinds of symbols people come up with.

This is exactly what people say about the dollar, it's too big for anything to compete. Things that are better win.

People on HN seem to buy into that fantasy far too often.

If that's your argument you'll have to save it for when I can pay my mortgage and taxes in BTC.

Taxes (to I presume some American government for the purposes of my reply here) are a bad example; taxes are defined as being collected in American Dollars. That is the purpose of American Dollars.

Paying a mortgage in BitCoin is at least not out of the question someday. (Though you'd have to be pretty brave to denominate your mortgage in BitCoin... and the counterparty would also be being pretty brave....)

you'd have to be pretty brave to denominate your mortgage in BitCoin

I prefer "clinically insane"

No they don't. Things have to be significantly better to win, not just better, but way better.

> This is exactly what people say about the dollar, it's too big for anything to compete. Things that are better win.

Actually, things that are both good enough and first win over things that are better (considered in isolation) all the time; network effects and transition costs, among other contributing factors, are real, even though they are the kind of things that are often assumed away in simplistic analyses.

Yes everyone uses ฿ already. Just do a google image search for Bitcoin and you'll see.

Not all national currencies have a symbol, so to speak. A lot of times you just abbreviate the currency a certain standard way, so 5 btc, as written a lot, is just fine and widely accepted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_symbol

Examples:

Indonesian rupiah - Rp

Guatemalan quetzal - Q

Lithuanian centas - ct

This is where the generic "non-specific currency" symbol -- ¤ -- can also come into play. Though I just about never see it get used, which is probably an indicator of something.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_sign_%28typography%29

I don't think "BTC" should be used in contexts where it may be construed as an ISO-4217 currency code, as the first 2 letters correspond with ISO country codes and "BT" is reserved for Bhutan. I believe currencies not attached to specific geography or sovereignty should start with X (No country names start with X). So XBC seems the right fit.

Correct, XBT is the ISO name for bitcoin. Most people don't know this and are still using BTC, but BTC is wrong.

I suspect a lot of the original bitcoin folks, typically being some variant of libertarian or anarchist, couldn't care less what some random unelected multinational organization says.

Previously discussion of this same symbol, Ƀ:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5451084

Archive of the first version of this manifesto

https://web.archive.org/web/20131031203409/http://www.ecogex...

"A plugin is needed to display this content"

If you need text only bitcoin identifier why not use "btc" as everybody else does.

USD is different from $, EUR is different from €…

Unlike USD vs $, EUR actually is €, though.

Well, no. One is a currency sign and the other is ISO 4217 code.

Sure, but USD and CAD both use the same $ symbol even though they are both pretty popular currencies used in neighboring countries.

At smaller point sizes it looks like a bit of dirt has landed on a B... or a font rendering glitch.

> “How does everyone feel about the B symbol with the two lines through the outside? Can we live with that as our logo?”

Yeah, let's just stick to what Satoshi recommended.

The author of this article doesn't seem to realize that a Unicode character is harder to enter than an image. For example, on Microsoft Windows, it appears that you would have to:

1. Google "enter unicode character"

2. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_input all the way down to the "Hexadecimal input" section

3. Manually set a registry key

4. Reboot your system

5. Correctly convert 243 to hexadecimal

6. Hold the Alt key, press + on the numeric keypad, and then enter the desired hexadecimal value.

Inserting an image is something that people are much more likely to already know, or be able to easily figure out.

I think this is the right idea, especially since the symbol's already in unicode - regardless, I think the two vertical lines on a B has gained too much traction to topple it at this stage.

This is not the kind of thing you want to advertise via website. There is an actual Bitcoin community and the idea is to convince influential people in that community to follow your approach. If you put it on a website and advertise it outside of the community, then you just confuse people who don't know Bitcoin very well on one side, and make a lot of reparation work for the actual Bitcoin community on the other hand. I don't know but this just seems to be an inefficient approach.

It looks ugly.

Inverted cross symbolism is not ideal.. there will be those who find it distasteful.. just saying

kinda hurts the eye, unfortunately

meh, to late,people are using the old logo.

Flash. Somebody just came out from under a rock :)

Flash is used to copy the Ƀ character to the clipboard when you click on the Ƀ symbol in the header. This is only possible with Flash, and I don't see any other uses of Flash on their page. Click-to-copy is actually a handy little feature. I just used it to type Ƀ in this comment.

What's a good symbol for snafu?

never gonna happen, too late :|

Great idea. +1

Reply on news.ycombinator.com