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Bitcoin is Stupid and Does Not Deserve an Emoji (blog post)
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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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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.~~
Edit: jumped the gun on that definition, just took the code block from Wikipedia. But there is no ambiguity on which character is an emoji and which is not. The Unicode Consortium publishes lists of emoji and guidelines on how they should be rendered.
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 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".
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.
I am aware of the lists and guidelines, I've been linking and quoting them to you. :)
It's their report on the standards that highlights that they don't think there's a clear distinction between "emoji" and "character", and that it's mostly a matter of user expectation.
Hence some pictograph characters having a default "text" presentation, and some having a default "emoji" presentation. They also clarify that some things with a default "emoji" presentation aren't in the set of characters people would associate with emoji and shouldn't be counted if you're trying.
I understand what you're saying, which is that the selection criteria is different for a "language symbol" as opposed to a "pictographic symbol", so they're different things.
I disagree and think that "default presentation" might be a better metric, but that ultimately it's about user and platform expectations. The same character can be presented "emoji" style or "text" style depending on context.
In any case, I'd also agree that there's no viability to the notion that people use the Bitcoin symbol in a way that's independent of the one meaning that it has, so a colorful cartoony rendition becoming an option doesn't really fit. "His Christmas gift was $$$" is a sentiment people might express. "The hotel is ₿₿₿" just ... Isn't.