The Bitcoin community is rallying behind a petition demanding the proposal of a Bitcoin emoji. The movement, termed ‘Bitcoin Emoji’, started in March and has so far garnered close to 7,500 signatures. The goal, however, is to reach 1.35 million signatures. The campaign is lagging in momentum despite the support of 25 large crypto organizations. Still, members are determined to achieve their goal, with their official website claiming that Bitcoin deserves its rightful place in the digital dictionary. The push for making Bitcoin an official emoji is not in the hands of system developers, but the Unicode Consortium, who yearly gather to review proposals for new emojis. These community-sanctioned emojis are then made permanent on smartphone keyboards. Many backing the Bitcoin Emoji movement comes from large cryptocurrency exchanges and analytics firms, deeming the initiation as one to promote crypto adoption and accessibility.
However, this move raises questions of contradiction to Bitcoin’s founding principle of decentralization — an antithesis of control by a single entity. Critics argue that large industry players backing the movement may be misleading the public by promoting an illusion that Bitcoin is widely held. Moreover, critics find it contradictory for Bitcoin to be promoted by libertarians when only El Salvador, which passed a law mandating retailers to accept it, uses it for payments.
This is not the first time that efforts have been made to establish a Bitcoin emoji. Previous attempts were made in 2020, even gaining the support of Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey. Unfortunately, it was not included in the lineup of emojis for that year. Whether this renewed campaign will yield different results remains to be seen.
