Bitcoin Forum

Every form of currency, since the very beginning of its existance, had to do with power: it is the establishment of a sovereign and its glory which justifies the shared trust into a symbolic form of value circulation. Since money is not anymore backed by a material value in metal, its glorification and the representation of commonly recognized symbols becomes an even more important issue....

more here (http://bitcoinmedia.com/on-the-glorification-of-bitcoin/)

This is an awesome article

So far in my life I learned enough to know that people will always do what they want to do and that I can't control anyone beside myself.

But even so I have to try and plead with the community:

Please, do us a favor and if you're going to invent new symbols for Bitcoin, don't look for inspiration in the old failed and oppressive ideologies but instead look forward to freedom and cooperation, to spontaneous order as opposed to order by government's monopoly on violence and to a society with freely agreed to rules, consistent and mandatory for everyone as opposed to a central authority with dual standards and last but not least to a market regulated and constrained by it's participants as opposed to a market regulated by a central planing authority.


I beg you, please draw your inspiration in images of freedom, voluntarism, cooperation, openness, consistency, capitalism and entrepreneurship as opposed to oppression, violence, and pretense of knowledge. Thank you.

I don't understand how and why you managed to mention capitalism as something opposite of oppression, violence, and pretense of knowledge.

When people left of center like yourself (totally assuming so correct me if I'm wrong) hear or see the word 'capitalism' there is meaning applied that could be defined as oppressive, violent etc.

but when people with more libertarian leaning ideals (like myself) use the word 'capitalism' we mean; a respect for private property, a respect for the rights of the individual, freedom to enter into mutually beneficial contracts, self ownership etc.

I think it means very different things to different people. semantics. 

The C word drives me nuts. You can do good or bad stuff with capital, obviously, really really obviously. Right now it is nearly always mixed with violence and it's terrible. But come on, the violence is he problem, not the stuff.

The belief that acquiring more stuff than your neighbors makes you better than them incites violence. You can't have capitalism without it.

The symbol should be a circle, left half white, right half black. Kind of like the symbol for the machine society in the Matrix animations.

Bitcoin does not need a symbol. Bitcoin is just Bitcoin.

What we need are commercial services that engrave your Bitcoin addresses, public keys or private keys in a secure manner. Or sell the alphabet in parts and you do the assembling, like in beads, or scrabble type letters, or embroidered letters that you stitch together.

We need a movie that uses the concept of bitcoins so that some wealthy billionaire hands over his inheritance as a piece of paper with bitcoin keys. Or someone finds a granite block with the etched address.

Yeah, that will "glorify" bitcoin alright, but I don't know if that will do what we want it to do. Maybe Fast and Furious 6 will have the bad guy storing his money in bitcoins.

We need Joe Pesci.  :D

Capitalism is a word known to be an anti-concept, i.e a word that makes communication MORE difficult instead of facilitating it just like a bad actor makes undestanding of a character more difficult.
I would stay away from it on this forum.

@OP The idea of a bitcoin mascot was discussed before and I like the Alpaca, a fairly innocent, unassuming animal.
The empty throne proposed in the article is still a symbol of centralized power, not optimal to represent the bitcoin movement.

I thought "Capitalism" was coined (pardon the pun) as an answer to or opposite of Communism. The problem is that they both seem to share the same flaw: human nature. Things like natural inequality, greed/sense of ego, entitlement, superiority and so on, combined with the unavoidable realities of having to co-exist with other people in the world, mean that brute force is required to enforce Communist ideals. Those same human features are "free to corrupt" Capitalism.

In practice, many societies seem to strive for some kind of healthy middle ground, whereby the worst aspects of both are limited. There is usually some kind of framework to include things that don't "fit" the market model. For example: prisons, a public healthcare system, a road code, an education system, and so on. Some may argue that if societies simply enforce a "user pays" policy to everything, it'll be fine. But in many cases that attitude is demonstrably wrong. For example, a mentally ill criminal with no family or friends is stuck in an institution to protect all the die-hard capitalists on the outside. Who pays?

Overall I think Bitcoin is simply a realistic attempt to solve some problems that other types of money have. No more, no less.

How about something that symbolises ones and zeros?

As long as the Satoshi-seeded block chain exists, I don't care what you call it. I plan to change my client to Jesus Coin, because I like the name.

Your friendly torte insurance company. The problem isn't that society needs prisons and government goons to bash down your door and force you to pay for them. The problem is that prisons, as a "rehabilitation program", teach offenders to become career criminals rather than just petty offenders.

People go to prison out of a background of child abuse, and are then subjected to further abuse in prison, reinforcing the lesson that violence and dishonesty are the solution to their problems. Sure, there are problems where externalities aren't easily avoidable, but the solution is never to get a big group of assholes with guns and have them tell everyone what to do and steal money from everyone on an ongoing basis to pay for said activities.

The solution to keeping child molesters away from your children is not to administer TSA agents to molest your children legally at the airport, mall, school and so on.

Does wikipedia require a totalitarian tax collection agency to operate?

1) Which Magic the Gathering Card has the empty throne on it?

2) Very strong title for a simple thread/article discussing a symbol for Bitcoin.  I think we can develop a symbol for bitcoin without a need to "glorify" bitcoin...

ciao

The tone of the article is a little off, but it raises an important issue.

If bitcoin is socially considered "nerd money" that won't be as good as "amazingly awesome money".

The die-hard capitalists needing the protection should pay.  Nobody in prison is a "user", the people outside are the ones who benefit.  However, like Haplo said, in reality nobody benefits because our prison system refines criminals rather than repairing them.

This is getting way off topic, but...

I used to think that about prison. Now it's clear to me that many of the 'criminals' on the inside are there for the protection and/or service of the criminals on the outside. It's a bonus to them that many degenerate inside making a nice excuse to keep it all going.

That is a good point, but not always the case.  For example, I have an adopted brother who is retarded and was abused as a child.  He has been to prison several times and has only gained knowledge of how to be a criminal.  He's not smart enough to pull it off though, so he'll just keep going back.  He doesn't want a normal life, and any attempt to keep him off the streets just ends up with him running off and getting put away.  He needs help, but all they offer is criminal minds 101.

Hmm, my "die-hard capitalists" comment was probably bit OTT. It can get a bit overwhelming as a non-American to be bombarded with so many American-centric attitudes and issues when interacting in the Bitcoin sphere. For example, I mentioned "institution" and everyone assumed I was talking about prison. Meanwhile, Australia has publicly funded secure hospitals for the mentally ill. I guess you could call those prisons, and I guess that in theory some way could be contrived to make them private, profitable, and all encompassing. But I guess no-one's figured how to extend "the Bitcoin way" to the rest of society just yet.

Back on topic: Bitcoin is already glorious enough on its own two feet without someone glorifying it. As for marketing ideas, why not pay homage to the binary number system?

Well, more on topic, personally the only thing I would change about the bitcoin 'logo' is to clearly give it only one strike through the B rather than two. The double strike through the USD symbol is an accentuated "U", so that the design makes a "US". Conversely, there are no "U"s in bitcoin.

Even the regular dollar symbol seems to be based on a "serpent coiled around a cross", which pharmacies sometimes display. If I start digging around on the Net, I'm sure to find all kinds of occult/religious/pagan history surrounding it.

How about a Tetris-like "B" in bright colours? I know it's a bit Google, but Google is popular, whereas shiny bullion-like designs remind of dodgy poker sites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_of_Asclepius

Sometimes also the similar Caduceus is used, both are Greek. "Pagan" is a christian word for "people we're going to torture and make into second-class citizens of christiandom".

The BTC symbol reminds me of the "beli" symbol used on One Piece.

http://onepiecesite.altervista.org/22.jpg

The "staff" going through it isn't any more meaningful than the rod going through a treble (G) clef symbol.
http://suzifiner.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54edc7dcf88330133ee41ab64970b-800wi

Only the "double staff" that makes the U in U$ has any particular meaning on a currency that I'm aware of.