35 crypto companies got together to make a change dot org petition called “Bitcoin Deserves an Emoji”.
F that
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.
an emoji for cryptocurrency
💩🪙
I mean it has its issues but a non regulated currency not controlled by a government is cool imo
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.
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?
Satoshi Nakamoto.
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.
if you can’t present evidence, then you’re just spreading uncertainty and doubt.
Satoshi Nakamoto is some kind of consipracy…?
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.
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.
You do that. 👍
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.
Just send the file hash and only download a copy if you don’t have it.
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.
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?
It probably falls under faulty comparison:
https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#Faulty_Comparison
Their guidelines change, and it’s possible these emoji were added with old guidelines. They can’t remove old emoji, which means specific buildings like Tokyo Tower🗼is an emoji, even if they prohibit the addition of specific buildings nowadays.
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.
It makes a lot more sense to implement this the way country flags are implemented in Unicode.
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.
Probably even more so
probably? shitcoin isn’t even in the same
ballparkuniverse as something like McDonald’s or Pepsi.We also need a McDonald’s emoji, Pepsi emoji, Windows emoji and Mastercard emoji
bitcoin is not a company.
Also not a brand, in the trademark sense
🍟 <<< Only one brand sells French fries / Chips in this format. And it’s the super-size format.
Unicode Consortium decide which emoji should be included. It’s up to each vendor themselves to come up with how they should look like. I don’t think Unicode Consortium explicitly state it must look like McDonald’s fries.
No. But the description of the Emoji is French Fries in a red carton.
Now I can’t be absolutely certain only McDonald’s sells french fries in a red carton, nor do I know if red french fry cartons are trademarked (answers to these questions evaded simple websearches) but I have never seen french fries sold in red cartons outside of McDonald’s.
If you do find non-McDonald’s french fries sold in a red carton, please point them out.
Red carton is chosen because that’s how it’s commonly depicted in cartoon images.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=french+fries+cartoon&t=h_&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images
The red and white stripes are the generic 50’s era diner fries. Flat red was introduced by McDonald’s in the 1980s extra-large and super-size cartons. (Before that McDonald’s fries were sold in white waxed-paper envelopes.
At KFC they’re in a red plastic box of the same format. Can’t buy them cuz of reusable packaging laws in France, but that’s what I thought first when I saw this emoji
That’s fair. I had forgotten KFC made their own version of fries and boxed them in red.
Mastercard emoji
💳
hail emoji?
Bitcoin is digital money. A better analogy would be to campaign for a USD, Yen, euro or British pound emoji.
Oh wait, they already exist.
https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#Faulty_Comparison
The existence of other emoji can’t justify the inclusion of a new emoji. Those emojis are old, and it’s unlikely they would’ve been approved under Unicode’s current guidelines.
I agree with you.
I’m not really arguing for a bitcoin emoji. Just against the McDonald’s brand comparison.
BTC is not mainstream enough (and never will be) to be needed in everyday text speak.
It’s also a scam. But those who fell for it and NFTs want to downtown cuz mad
Except those are real currencies the world recognizes.
Most businesses will tell you to fuck off if you try to pay them in bitcoin.
Most businesses will tell you to fuck off if you try to pay them in bitcoin.
Yes and no. You can indirectly pay for things in Bitcoin using a Bitcoin credit card. Although I’m not sure why you would want to.
It’s not “paying in bitcoin” if you have a random third party on your side converting it to a currency that isn’t a joke.
Bitcoin is a network protocol. not a brand.
The logo and name is the brand. How do you visually represent a specific payment protocol without using its logo? There’s no emoji for HTTP or TCP either.
I’m actually for the idea of emojis for protocols. Not Bitcoin specifically because I don’t think it has long term potential as a deflationary virual asset, but block chain? Sure.
while there may not be an emoji for http, maybe there should be. there is sort of an unofficial one (a broken lock), and there are other protocols that have logos. as another commenter said, it’s kind of silly to fight for an emojii for it, and probably sillier to fight against it.
while there may not be an emoji for http, maybe there should be.
We don’t need another gzip or bzip2 logo. Lol
Nobody is saying Bitcoin to refer to that, ever. Come on.
maybe no one you talk to, but I assure you, it happens. it is happening right now, in this conversation
These are not public infrastructure
Neither is Bitcoin.
yes, it is. anyone can spin up a node or download the blockchain or make an address.
Anyone can shit their pants. Is that “infrastructure”?
You think you can fool people by using a simple straw man argument technique? Come on, get your shit together. Bitcoin is infrastructure as anyone can submit transactions to the network and they will be seamlessly processed. As simple as that
I know that shouting “straw man!” is the first step of trying to deflect from being wrong on the Internet… But if you’re going to do it, at least know what a straw man is.
My argument is that “Infrastructure” != “anyone can do it”.
Infrastructure is something that benefits and maintains the general public. Bitcoin benefits a handful of cryptobros, billionaires… and most importantly ransomware rings.
Your straw man is “shit in their pants”
Read your own comments dude
the sewer is infrastructure. i don’t think you understand the network protocol.
I’m not using the sewer when I shit my pants. I don’t think you understand pants.
maybe you should use the public infrastructure.
Should the fediverse get an emoji? How about Matrix?
as was already said elsewhere, advocating for an emoji is silly, and advocating against one might be sillier.
Putting significant energy into campaigning against it? Sure. But what’s silly about saying “this is a stupid idea and shouldn’t happen”?
that blog post and petition are significantly more than just saying it’s stupid
It already has a codepoint. ₿
You don’t get a new Emoji by creating a change .org petition lol
You need to write a proper proposal and send it to the Unicode consortium: https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html. If it gets rejected, it’s four years until you can reapply for the same Emoji.
A Bitcoin emoji was rejected in 2020 i doubt it will be any different this time.
Yeah I doubt it’d be approved… I was just saying that there’s an actual process that has to be followed. The Unicode consortium aren’t going to care about a Change .org partition that gets maybe 20k signatures at most given billions of people use Unicode and they’ve got proper processes to go through.
I absolutely agree with you.
Overnight a terrible proposal on the first day, get it rejected for everyone for four years
(I know they’d look at others)
If boobs don’t have their emoji, bitcoin doesn’t deserve it either!
We have an established tradition to represent sexual characteristics with fruit. 🍆, 🍑, 🍈 🍈.
To be fair, I whenever I go to market and see the eggplants, I feel inadequate. Also in the last decade many of the more classical substitutes have emerged in the emoji library. 🌶️, 🥒, 🥚🥚, 🌮, 🍪, 🎂, 🎃🎃
what’s the cookie supposed to mean?
I think the same thing as 🍑, or 🌮, but in the context of pleasantly getting a peek due to a brief wardrobe malfunction. At least that’s the context in which I’ve seen it.
Emoji? Why not unicode character like $ or €?
Edit: Dear OP, please stop popularizing these ₿rat’s marketing ideas
This is how you end up with weird Unicode characters like 𖡄.
Your comment lead me to this overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Unicode_chart_Bamum_Supplement
Here you’ll find all the evergreens such as these, among many others:
𖠈 𖡠 𖢍 𖢯 𖣞 𖣐 𖤗 𖥓 𖤫 𖧌 𖨰
₿ like this?
That actually makes sense, that’s why
Like this? ₿
This will likely be rejected for one the same reasons that they decided they would not add any new flag emojis. Flags come and go. Bitcoin hasn’t even been around for 20 years yet, and its future is highly uncertain.
Also, considered as a currency, it would be better as a regular text character, not an emoji. Like $, €, ¥, £, etc.
I actually don’t mind it being added as a text character because then I can actually use it. Using it as an emoji is useless to everyone other than the crypto bros that want to spam it on Twitter.
It already exists: ₿
Where are you unable to use emojis?
I don’t know about strictly “unable” but there are a million contexts where it is a bad idea and simply not done. Like a spreadsheet or financial document. Or anywhere you want your text to behave like text — with a consistent font, color, style, etc. The difference between $ (text) and 💲 (emoji) is pretty stark in most contexts.
For example, on the dark background of the UI I am viewing your comment on, The $ symbol is in white colour (as the font has been set).
But the emoji is dark grey, and wouldn’t be visible if I had a cheap, low contrast monitor.
For me it looks like this:
So the text one appears the same for both of us but the emoji one appears differently which could possibly change its meaning if they were different enough
Probably because the emoji fonts don’t change their colour with the
font.color, which normal characters do.And your browser is using a different font from mine
Emoji are only supported in rich text formatted documents they’re not actual text. If I type a Euro symbol it’s a Euro symbol it’s not a picture of a Euro symbol depending on context it’s the actual Euro symbol. If I ask a computer what symbol it is the computer can tell me it’s a Euro symbol, it doesn’t go, ooh I don’t know it’s a picture.
€ 💶
One renders consistently irrespective of device viewing the other is entirely dependent of device viewing. Go look at this post on different devices and see the problem
Technically, emoji doesn’t even have specific flags, they just have country codes, conforming to the ISO list - actually choosing which flags will be included is up to the individual implemeters. Regional flags got a little bit complicated because they need to establish the conventions first.
Cryptocurrency is speedrunning ruining everything. We might as well have a laugh at the cryptobros’ expense in the meantime.
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.
Thanks, I’ll read on it :)
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.
AFAIK there’s a lot of talk about making GNU Taler the basis for the ‘digital Euro’ which is curently being debated at the EU Parliement.
Yea, that is interesting! I don’t really understand a lot of it though. Wonder how censorship-resistant it can be, and whether the receiver would be able to cash it out anonymously.
I’m not an expert on it, but I’ve done a certain amount of study on it.
I’m pretty sure there are no privacy guarantees for money receivers. Merchants/sellers would still be identifiable by banks and governments and such. So Taler isn’t what anyone selling heroin or doing murder for hire would want to be using as an accepted payment method. (At least not any more so than credit/debit card transactions will help the seller with keeping their doings secret.)
But Taler can keep the buyers’ identity secret. Unless you’re doing things in ways that reveal information about yourself, your bank and your government wouldn’t know you were buying fursuits even if they knew the merchant was selling fursuits.
So all that to say that no, the merchant couldn’t cash out anonymously.
What I don’t understand is whether it is like “Taler is obtained and cashed out only in a bank, but the link between two events is unknown” or if Taler can change hands during said “link”.
If the former - I really hope it gets implemented as a card replacement, but it would need to coexist with something like Monero (which is what I use now) that is more akin to cash. But I really hope that somehow non-blockchain full-on “digital cash” could one day be invented, so wonder if this could be it :)
How I understand it is:
- You go to your bank (or use a webapp or whatever) who knows who you are and get them to initiate a withdrawl from your bank account to your Taler wallet in the amount of, say $100.
- The balance in your Taler wallet goes up by $100. The bank also decrements your bank account by $100 and puts that $100 in an escrow holding intending to pay it to whatever recipient(s) can provide cryptographic proof that you gave them Taler.
- You go to a merchant and pay out of that $100 Taler balance $9 for a cheeseburger and fries.
- The merchant receives $9 in Taler from you and checks with your bank that that $9 hasn’t already been spent previously before concluding the payment process and giving you your receipt and burger.
- You now have a burger and fries and your Taler balance is $91.
- But the merchant doesn’t learn anything about your identity in the process. But they do have proof that your bank has $9 in escrow earmarked for them (the merchant) specifically.
- And your bank doesn’t know which of their customers to which they’ve ever given Taler is the one buying from the merchant in question. They just know that of the total sum of Taler they’ve issued that hasn’t been collected yet, $9 is earmarked for such-and-such merchant/burger joint.
- The merchant can settle up any time, but theoretically the bank can charge per-transaction fees. In order to minimize fees, it behooves the merchant to batch up settlements. The merchant can claim actual USD for every dollar that was used at that establishment by customers via Taler over, say, the last week or whatever in one big settlement batched transaction.
I’m leaving out some details, but that should give you a decent idea of how things work with Taler.
Now, as for this bit:
if Taler can change hands during said “link”.
That, I’m not sure of. It might be that you can transfer Taler from your wallet to someone else’s wallet (that they could then spend) without any identities being revealed, though they wouldn’t be able to get real USD or whatever without working with your bank which would generally insist on confirming their identity. But I’d think in order for the recipient in that situation to know that they actually had real Taler and not Taler that you had already spent and that wouldn’t actually work if they tried to spend it or cash it in, they’d have to make basically an API call to your bank, though unless the bank blocked all traffic from every VPN and traffic anonymizer (like Tor or I2p) in existence, I see no reason why it couldn’t be done in a way that preserved the recipient’s anonymity.
So yeah. Not sure. But even if that bit isn’t a thing, I still want Taler to take off.
Ah, so probably would not work to evade censorship/sanctions. I would REALLY love to use such a thing instead of my card though.
isn’t blockchain-based, doesn’t work on proof-of-work or proof-of-stake
These things weren’t introduced as a gimmick they are used to solve specific problems.
GNU Taller is pretty fragile, though. One bank issues unbacked tokens and the credibility of the whole system goes down the drain. It’s the current financial system, just rebranded. Also, it promotes taxation which automatically makes it a cult & scam.
One bank issues unbacked tokens
- The Taler protocol has bank auditors built-in.
- Your hypothetical would just as much apply to existing debit cards.
- Unbacked tokens. You mean like Tether? (Let alone Terra.)
Also, it promotes taxation which automatically makes it a cult & scam?
The fuck? How does Taler “promote taxation?”
Fuckin’ Libertarians.
Unbacked tokens. You mean like Tether?
Exactly like Tether. USDT was never backed 1:1 by USD. They don’t even try to deny it anymore. They admit it’s backed by “various assets, including BTC”, which smells like a market manipulation.
How does Taler promote taxation?
“Customers can stay anonymous, but merchants can not hide their income through payments with GNU Taler. This helps to avoid tax evasion and money laundering.”
Thank you for being honest about being pro-tax-evasion and pro-money-laundering.
Please describe how I can send the money to my mom in Russia (disconnected from SWIFT) with GNU Taler today. I’ll wait.
I don’t know how I could possibly have been more explicit about it not yet being ready for any real-world use cases than I was.
It will never be ready. It doesn’t even make sense. To transact with real fiat like the US dollar, you’ll have to go through an official on-ramp and an off-ramp of the respective government. And to do an international transaction you’ll have to use one of the widely accepted systems like SWIFT. GNU Taler doesn’t appear to address anything like that. Anyhow, my comment was made with the premise of this whole thread in mind, i.e. “Bitcoin is stupid” or “snake oil”. Yet there’s no alternatives to what crypto provides. So is it that stupid after all?
How wasteful!
Anyhow, today I’m going to resume using a currency backed by oil and nukes, which encourages consumption on purpose. I will then either exploit workers by investing in a for-profit business, or get poorer.
But someday, in the future, economics will work the way I expect them to. That’s when I’ll switch to something better!
Russia has had oil and nukes and it didn’t stop the ruble from collapsing in the 90s
Maybe reexamine your assumptions
Exactly. With Monero, she gets it in seconds and no one can stop it.
lol the downvotes. your mom is clearly evil and doesn’t deserve any money
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.
I liked the idea for awhile as well. But for me, learning about the “proof of work” underpinning is what changed my mind. That - and the fact that cryptocurrency does not actually have any of the strengths that it claims to have. It’s definitely and interesting idea… but in practice it’s all just scams and incentivised waste.
That’s interesting. I’ve initially written it off as a scam. Until I’ve learned about the proof-of-work.
Did they or did a bunch of media get pushed that told us all what these crypto bros were doing like shitting on beaches and taking our jobs.
Seriously though I’m picking up on a trend that a lot media has a greater influence on opinion then I’ve ever seen before
Bitcoin is over 15 years old now, that’s not a particularly fast speedrun.
I would rather point my finger at wall street or financial institutions not at the tools that offers a viable option to avoid these
Suggestion: We do with the Bitcoin emoji what people did with the eggplant emoji. The B stands for butthole. So now we can do [eggplant emoji] [bitcoin emoji].
I’m sure the TOTALLY NOT HOMOPHOBIC tech bros will love it.
Have you checked your =B=?
We must do this if it happens.
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.
That is also not 100% true. There are several altcoins with fantastic utility. Monero and Ethereum come to mind.
Exactly. Most cryptocurrencies are scams, but a handful are fantastic. Ethereum is cool for being proof-of-stake (so no high-energy mining), and Monero is cool for being super privacy-oriented. There are a handful more, but honestly, if you stick with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero, you’ll be fine.
That’s pretty much exactly my thought. I hold a very very small amount in Polygon, but only in order to pay the gas fees for the Polygon network. So I never have more than a few US dollars worth in it at a time.
Yeah, I basically just do Monero, and I use it as a spend account and use it anywhere it’s accepted. I don’t invest in any cryptocurrencies because I don’t think cryptocurrencies have positive expected return (it’s all hype), so I keep the amount of crypto I have small.
Ethereum has scam characteristics though. The creator Vitalik gave himself time to mine it alone before giving public access. He secured for himself quite a nice stash
That’s true. I suspect the application programming is the only reason that it actually took off.
I wouldn’t argue with that. I was mostly generalizing.
Of course bitcoin is a scam. It’s a “currency” you can’t spend anywhere. It’s only purpose is a pump and dump scheme for early adopters.
It’s a “currency” you can’t spend anywhere.
You could’ve at least pretended to have done some basic research…
It’s a “currency” you can’t spend anywhere
Lol
It’s only purpose is a pump and dump scheme for early adopters.
This is exactly what many alt-coins are but Bitcoin is decidedly not.
You’re confusing “easy to mine” with “early adopter scam”.
It would create legitimation and that could further increase its popularity
#bitcoinscam #tetherfraud
Can’t believe I wasted brainspace reading that garbage
It was a mistake that the Unicode people started to add emoji of their own at all ever in the first place.
My understanding is that emoji were originally added because they existed in other preexisting standards. They should have kept it at that. Now we get public discussions what concepts are important enough to “deserve” emoji, which is a stupid, pointless discussion that could have been avoided if they had not started doing that. We were able to communicate just fine before emoji were a thing.
I disagree with your opinion.
Bitcoin already has a unicode sign, which is plenty. We don’t need an emoji, we need better user access to the full unicode set. (To date, on both mobile and desktop, I have to sometimes websearch specific characters and copy-paste, and not all emoji are displayed on my PC Firefox browser, though it’s better now than last year). Also curiously, the Lemmy website text editor emoji picker only places an emoji at the end of the text, not where the cursor is (and adds a space I don’t want).
The current Emoji library has a frog face, 🐸 not a frog body. That’s a higher priority than a bitcoin. I could see some kind of generic crypto coin, maybe. Maybe.
On a parallel subject, I do think the international community would do well to create a decentralized currency, and I do think blockchain may figure into this, but it needs to be secure and allow for anonymous transactions, and not allow for tampering with the ledger. Bitcoin has failed on all three accounts. We need a better, more robust system, but it seems all current cryptocurrencies are practice, and toys for prospectors and gamblers until we make a robust one.
I absolutely do not want to encourage the ransomware industry.
Absolutely agree. Unfortunately, it would probably be negatively stigmatized for [insert illegal hot-button topic] like encrypted messaging is.
but it needs to be secure and allow for anonymous transactions, and not allow for tampering with the ledger. Bitcoin has failed on all three accounts.
Lol what? No legitimate bitcoin critics make these claims against Bitcoin. The ledger is immutable and the transactions are pseudo anonymous. In fact your typical bitcoin critic lists these as downsides (“no way to reverse mistakes” and “cannot prevent money laundering”) right after the criticisms about energy consumption.
You legitimately have no idea what you’re talking about.
I’m not a Bitcoin or crypto expert (though I remember news about a decade ago about unrelated data, including pictures, ending up in the ledger. Maybe they fixed it?) Rather I think about what I’d want in a currency that we don’t have in state-backed currencies.
And yes, anonymity of transactions is one of the, money laundering is about justifying gains to a surveillance state on the grounds that only state-approved transactions should be allowed. Like the internet, the economy is and should be bigger than the regional states we have, unless you want Hollywood telling you what content you are allowed to watch and how many times before your license expires.
One of the problems with state-proprietary banking systems is that they can be manipulated for political purposes. It’s nice when this means depriving dicks of their money (say Putin and Russian Oligarchs) but it’s not very nice when it’s used to silence journalists who embarrass the ownership class (e.g. Wikileaks) or is used by industrialists to block competition (e.g. the MPAA and RIAA arranging for the freezing of Kim Dotcom’s assets, and those of Megaupload, which was about to release a new music distribution system).
The point is to create a currency that states cannot control or regulate.
Yes, there are matters like the black market. CSAM transactions have become more difficult to trace while cryptocurrencies are stable, but I suspect these can be addressed piecemeal when we actually confront problems like drug abuse and porn production. As it is, the people who do the most damage, cause the most cost and death have enough influence on state regulators of currency so as to not need to launder money. (Though they may fold conflict diamonds into ones mined from legitimate sources.)
You said the Bitcoin ledger is mutable. It’s not. You said Bitcoin isn’t anonymous and that’s mostly true because it’s pseduo-anonymous which can be fully anonymous if you want it to be.
Lack of emojis and also having an emoji are both good for bitcoin.
Being stupid is good for bitcoin too, probably.
