The Bitcoin Sign Is Now among the Unicode Standard
Update. Correction: There was a mistake made in reporting Twitter-user @ken_lunde and Reddit-user ‘kenshirriff’ as the same person earlier. This is not true and the article has since been edited and updated. Sincere apologies to both Kens.
The Bitcoin sign has been accepted by the Unicode Standard and will be included in a future version of Unicode.
This is the Bitcoin symbol: ₿. It’s a box right now but not long from now, a version of the Unicode Standard in the future will ensure that refreshing this page at that point in time will have the Bitcoin font turning up instead.
The recognition bestowed upon the Bitcoin symbol is largely due to the efforts of Twitter user @kenshirriff who, with help, submitted a proposal [PDF] for the addition of the bitcoin sign last month on October 2.
A month later, a post today on the user’s Twitter account revealed the outcome of the proposal:
Another Twitter user, @ken_lunde, spread the news with a tweet after catching onto the news early.
In the proposal, the bitcoin sign glyph is described as “a capital letter B with two vertical lines ‘going through’ it, though the lines are only visible at the top and bottom.”
Furthermore, the public-domain BTC.ttf font already contains the bitcoin sign, the proposal points out, noting that it serves as a good reference for the bitcoin sign.
Citing a unique user demand from the Reddit Bitcoin group, the proposal stressed the need for a bitcoin sign that is currently being used in a big way among 172,000 readers through the means of a specialized software.
As an interesting bit of insight, Reddit moderators have previously attempted to add support for the bitcoin sign in the forum but were unsuccessful due to technical reasons. All in all, Unicode support has and will make the adoption more seamless.
Suffice to say, the Bitcoin Redditors took the news well :
We encourage a look through the successful proposal by twitter user @kenshirriff , also ‘kenshirriff ’ on Reddit. The proposal available for download here [PDF].
Images from Shutterstock and Reddit.
