35 crypto companies got together to make a change dot org petition called “Bitcoin Deserves an Emoji”.
F that
Lack of emojis and also having an emoji are both good for bitcoin.
Being stupid is good for bitcoin too, probably.
Can’t believe I wasted brainspace reading that garbage
Maybe we don’t need a Bitcoin emoji, but we absolutely need a Doge emoji.
🐶 there’s already one
Lol, doge
Woah way too many emojis already!
😀😃😄😁😆😅🤣😂🙂😉😊😇🥰😍🤩😘😗😚😙😏
Cryptocurrency is speedrunning ruining everything. We might as well have a laugh at the cryptobros’ expense in the meantime.
Bitcoin is over 15 years old now, that’s not a particularly fast speedrun.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 are a lot of talk about making GNU Taler the basis for the ‘digital Euro’ which is curently being debated at the EU Parliment.
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.
Thanks, I’ll read on it :)
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.
Please describe how I can send the money to my mom in Russia (disconnected from SWIFT) with GNU Taler today. I’ll wait.
Exactly. With Monero, she gets it in seconds and no one can stop it.
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
lol the downvotes. your mom is clearly evil and doesn’t deserve any money
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.
I would rather point my finger at wall street or financial institutions not at the tools that offers a viable option to avoid these
Bitcoin is stupid, but the point of Unicode is that we have a symbol for everything that has a commonly recognized symbol or representative value, or even uncommonly recognized.
If ⅌ gets a character, or all the symbols of the Byzantine musical notation system, I’m not sure why a typically recognized symbol for a cryptocurrency shouldn’t.
The weird bit is that they put together a petition. All you really need to do is submit a proposal and show that it’s a notable symbol and not owned by anyone in particular or a brand icon.
Here’s the proposal to add “goose” to Unicode. They even added a few joke-y bits, but they made a valid argument that “goose” is a symbol that people recognize. And now… 🪿
I don’t disagree with the overall comment, but there’s a difference between character and emoji. ⅌ got a character, but so did ₿ already.
There really isn’t a difference between a character and an emoji beyond an emoji being a stylized rendering of a character, or a character whose use is intended as a pictograph.
https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Introduction
They’re all just Unicode code points, although I suppose there’s some distinction between the characters with more context specific meaning or the ones that are more apt to modification a la 🧑⚕️👩🏿⚕️. But you’ve also got 💲 and $, where “bold dollar sign” is often represented as green, but “dollar sign” tends to be represented in contextual style. Is ☣ a character or an emoji? What about the thousands of “other symbols” as defined by the Unicode spec which may or may not have special character renderings depending on your platform and font?
And yeah, I didn’t know that character existed, so now it’s doubly confusing why anyone is asking for anything. The symbol has meaning, and it’s in the big book of meaningful symbols. Not sure what more they want.
There’s no ambiguity. Emoji are characters in the emoticons code block (U+1F600…U+1F64F). Emoji are indeed a subset of characters, but anything outside that block is not an emoji.
Gotcha, so ⌚(U+231A, miscellaneous technical block) isn’t an emoji, despite it clearly being a pictograph, and there are only 80 emoji?
I feel like this definition isn’t in line with either the lay definition of emoji, nor the technical definition
Emoji are pictographs (pictorial symbols) that are typically presented in a colorful cartoon form and used inline in text. They represent things such as faces, weather, vehicles and buildings, food and drink, animals and plants, or icons that represent emotions, feelings, or activities.
People often ask how many emoji are in the Unicode Standard. This question does not have a simple answer, because there is no clear line separating which pictographic characters should be displayed with a typical emoji style.
Emoji are seriously just Unicode characters that sometimes get rendered as a fancy image. That’s it. There’s an entire bit about how different characters have different conventional presentations and a codified system of “default” for image or “text”.
The presentation of a given emoji character depends on the environment, whether or not there is an emoji or text presentation selector, and the default presentation style (emoji versus text). In informal environments like texting and chats, it is more appropriate for most emoji characters to appear with a colorful emoji presentation, and only get a text presentation with a text presentation selector. Conversely, in formal environments such as word processing, it is generally better for emoji characters to appear with a text presentation, and only get the colorful emoji presentation with the emoji presentation selector.
That’s why there’s things like ☣️ and ☣. Same codepoint, but different presentation hints. (I’m assuming that our various systems will do the right thing and capture the presentation hints, otherwise I’m going to look very odd putting the same symbol over and over :-) )
I rushed to just grab that codeblock from Wikipedia. But the selection of which characters are considered emoji is not arbitrary. The Unicode Consortium (their Unicode Emoji Standard and Research Working Group to be exact) publishes those list and guidelines on how they should be rendered. I believe the most recent version of the standard is Emoji 15.1.
Edit: I realized I’m going off track here by just reacting to comments and forgetting my initial point. The difference I was initially alluding to is in selection criteria. The emoji. for assigning a character a Unicode codepoint is very different from the criteria for creating a new emoji. Bitcoin has a unique symbol and there is a real need to use that symbol in written material. Having a unicode character for it solves that problem, and indeed one was added. The Emoji working group has other selection criteria (which is why you have emoji for eggplant and flying money, and other things that are not otherwise characters. So the fact that a certain character exists, despite its very limited use, has no bearing on whether something else should have an emoji to represent it.
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.
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.
#bitcoinscam #tetherfraud
It already has a codepoint. ₿
Proprietary money is a scam.
I agree but I’m not sure BTC fit the definition of proprietary money I’m finding online. How does BTC qualify in your opinion?
Emoji? Why not unicode character like $ or €?
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
That actually makes sense, that’s why
Like this? ₿
₿ like this?
If boobs don’t have their emoji, bitcoin doesn’t deserve to 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?
