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2024-08-03
Yeah so, a group of 35 cryptocurrency companies started a stupid change.org petition. The idea, as far as I can tell, is to put pressure on the Unicode Consortium to normalize their magic ponzi beans by officially making a Bitcoin emoji. The petition is called "Bitcoin Deserves an Emoji:
"Bitcoin deserves an emoji" petition on change dot org
The group is led by Nexo, and includes other large entities such as Kraken exchange, BTC Inc, OKX exchange, and Brave browser. It's unclear how much material help they're providing this campaign, but hilariously, the petition has only received a sliver of the support they were expecting, with just under 15,000 signatures since the March 7th launch, compared to the stated target of 1,350,000 - a number they were hoping to reach by April 2nd, which is when submissions to Unicode were reopened.
But regardless. A Bitcoin emoji? Fuck that shit.
So at the risk of providing them with free promotion, here's a counter-petition: Bitcoin is Stupid and Does Not Deserve an Emoji. Sign early and often - the goal is to get more signatures than the pro-bitcoin-emoji petition.
https://change.org/bitcoin-is-stupid
Yeah mostly! This one definitely is! And that's kind of the point: making an official Unicode emoji for Bitcoin is also stupid, just like Bitcoin itself.
In fact, Bitcoiners themselves could end up agreeing with that last one sooner than many people expect. Another halving or two (maybe well before that if the price takes another prolonged nose-dive), and the mining rigs sitting idle are going to vastly outweigh the ones in use; it's not hard to imagine, say, the US government deciding they want to guarantee themselves complete control over the network, and subsidizing 51% of miners with low-cost electricity - on the condition they agree to re-mine various blocks when requested. Alternately, it wouldn't be too difficult to make reciprocal agreements with allies to request the same thing of the industrial-scale miners in their jurisdictions, and/or threaten other countries with sanctions if they don't play ball.
Successfully reverse transactions a couple of times, and a hypothetical coalition of governments could simply put out the word that a certain address should be frozen, and any rational miner would refuse to add those transactions to a block, because they'd end up losing the block reward otherwise.
Whatever happens though, it's pretty clear at this point that transaction fees will not be enough to maintain security and decentralization along with price - which means that an official Unicode emoji would quickly become obsolete. In the short term though, a Bitcoin emoji would mostly serve as a way for these crypto companies to convince a new round of suckers that this 'sure-fire path to personal riches' is here to stay.
On the plus side: Unicode rejected a Bitcoin emoji once before in 2020, although I haven't been able to determine the exact reason for the rejection.
This is the first year since then that the proposal is eligible for re-review. I'm somewhat hopeful that it still doesn't meet Unicode's factors for inclusion, but who knows. I'd rather voice opposition now than after the fact, even if it's through a relatively meaningless petition.
When you sign, be assured that I won't spam you with updates or anything like that - but I'll DEFINITELY post here again if/when the signature count eclipses the pro-btc-emoji petition. Yes this post is a joke, but it's a serious joke. Sign now, and share this post (or a link to the petition) with two friends, and anyone else you think might be interested.
Thanks :)
