By
Godfrey Benjamin
November 24th, 2023
The Bitcoin foundation calls for volunteers for its Standards Committee, which will be responsible for finding bitcoin’s Unicode symbol.
The Bitcoin Foundation is looking for team members for its Standards Committee, which will be responsible for establishing a bitcoin Unicode symbol, reported by CoinDesk.
Moreover, the committee will be exploring items like bitcoin denomination conventions, the subject that is intensively discussed among the community members. The committee will also develop a recommended standard and have other unspecified duties.
The admin of bitcoin foundation forum Brad Wheeler posted the announcement, citing Kevin Beardsley as the go-to person for additional information.
A number of variations of existing symbols were proposed, as well as entirely new designs – although almost all of them based on a ‘B’ letter with some kind of a stroke overlaying the letter whether horizontally or vertically. Even though some of these designs are in limited use, there is no standard.
The first discussions among the bitcoin community about the possibility of introducing a Unicode symbol for bitcoin appeared last year.
A wide range of proposals of the symbol design were introduced ranging from ‘฿’ (Thai Baht symbol – currency of Thailand) to ‘Ƀ’ (U+0243). The latter one has been used by Blockchain company but hasn’t really caught on.
The Bitcoin Foundation Standards Committee will take a look at a number of different proposals, and after assessing them, will put them up for voting and eventually adopt the better one. Then comes the task of adding it to computing industry standard, Unicode.
Brad Wheeler said in his post on the bitcoin foundation forum: “Committee members would be responsible for meetings/discussion on an as-needed basis. ”
“The committee would also need a member to serve as chairperson, who would have opportunities to work closely with Foundation Staff. Other members would be able to participate in the capacities they deem best,” he added.
Additionally, along with a new Unicode symbol, bitcoin will also need an ISO currency code standard. Currency code XBT is gaining traction for bit coin under the ISO 4217 standard.
The committee will be also responsible for bitcoin denominations. The foundation reports that the bitcoin committee will have to look at denomination conventions and eventually “come up with a recommended standard” for them.
This task could be quite difficult, as there is a number of denominations out there that the committee will have to deal with.
At the moment Bitcoin wiki has a list of a dozen denominations under 1BTC, among them are ‘sanbitcoin’, ‘bitcoinbong’ and ‘satoshi’. Even though most of them are used on a daily basis, they are not under a standard.
