Future versions of the Unicode Standard will include the bitcoin sign. Opponents say it is too close to the Thai Baht (฿), the national currency of Thailand.

The proposal was adopted on 2 November at the quarterly meeting of the Unicode Technical Committee, hosted by Apple, in Sunnyvale, California. It describes bitcoin sign as follows: “a capital letter B with two vertical lines ‘going through’ it, though the lines are only visible at the top and bottom.”

The first proposal to add a bitcoin sign to Unicode was made in 2011. At that time, it was rejected because the proposal lacked examples of "the use of the bitcoin symbol in (running) text," and the symbol was suspected to be used as a commercial logo of bitcoin.org.

That’s why the new proposal, submitted by bitcoin enthusiast Ken Shirriff, included examples of bitcoin symbol in running text in multiple languages. It explained that bitcoin.org logo is in public domain. It also stressed the user community demand for a new symbol, citing favourable discussions in the Bitcoin group on Reddit (over 172,000 readers) and on Bitcointalk.

In his proposal, Shiriff also analyzed the possibility of using an existing Unicode symbol. It argued that using ฿ (Thai Baht symbol) might be considered “hijacking” or “stealing” the symbol. Using Ƀ (Latin capital letter with stroke), proposed by some bitcoiners, from his point of view is not practical, because it is quite different from the symbol already in use.

Shiriff believes that Unicode would not be flooded with symbols for other cryptocurrencies because “most other crypto-currencies have learned from the difficulty that a non-Unicode symbol causes for Bitcoin, and use a symbol already in Unicode”. Finally, answering possible doubts, he argued that bitcoin does not seem “a transient fad” because it had 1.3 million users in 2014 and even if bitcoin would suddenly disappear, “the bitcoin sign will still be useful for historical writing and research papers about currencies.”

Of course, this decision is not accepted by the whole bitcoin community. One of the first commentators on Ken Lunde’s tweet on Unicode called the adopted bitcoin sign “uninspired and ungracious”. For many bitcoiners it still seems too similar to the Thai Baht sign. They would prefer Ƀ or even a symbol not based at all on a Latin letter, but on zero and one. But, judging by the Reddit thread, most bitcoin enthusiasts are happy.

The word ‘bitcoin’ became listed in Oxford Dictionaries in 2013, followed by ‘cryptocurrency’ in 2014. In August 2015, it was joined by ‘blockchain’, ‘bitcoin miner’ and ‘Redditor’.

Alexey Tereshchenko