Bitcoin Sign Accepted By Unicode Standard

A major leap forward for the bitcoin community happened this week with the acceptance of a proposal to add the bitcoin sign to the Unicode computing standard.

“The bitcoin sign is well known and often used in running text, but it is not in Unicode. Adding this sign would be useful for research papers, websites, forums and other publications”, the proposal read.

Submitted by Ken Shirriff, the proposal had the support of the Bitcoin Foundation along with other bitcoin organisations, companies and developers. It was approved during a quarterly meeting held by the Unicode Consortium, the non-profit organization that coordinates the development of the Unicode standard, CoinDesk reported.

The Consortium included some prominent industry names such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and many others.

Drawing attention towards the support from bitcoin user community, Shirriff said:

“A discussion about adding the bitcoin sign on the Reddit Bitcoin group (which has over 172,000 readers) was highly favorable. The current proposal was also discussed on the popular digital currency forum bitcointalk.org and the Bitcoin developer forum bitcoin-dev which were supportive.”

Speaking to CoinDesk, he said that he saw a need for a submission based on an understanding of how exactly the Unicode Consortium goes about approving proposals.

"It seemed that nobody else in the bitcoin community really understood the Unicode process and because I had gone through it earlier with a totally unrelated character, I had some familiarity with how it worked. So I decided I should just do it myself”, Shirriff told CoinDesk.