Currency Symbol [ ɠ / ꞡ / ǥ / other ] #BS

issue is it looks like a zero, could be confusing.

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What about combining a G with a diagonal strikethrough? The lowercase g diagonal strikethrough (g-barre) is also very cool.

image

Not sure if I’ve written it here already, but my vote for sure goes on this Japanese character: ツ

45.642 ツ

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wouldn’t that be potentially mocking japan and china; you know heavy investors in coins?

@monkyyy

  1. This is the same character used in the ascii emoji shrug: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    Could you point to any previous cases where the use of this emoji has caused outrage?

  2. it might cause confusion amongst Japanese users. It’s a very real possibility. I struggle to see how it would mock them or be offensive in any way. It’s a hiragana character. Can you explain what you mean?

  3. Because it’s hiragana, this has nothing to do with the Chinese hanzi characters. How would the use of a Japanese character as a currency symbol mock the Chinese people?

I don’t know that part of asain cultures; but given that they skip floor numbers for sounding like death who knows what sort of thing it could be stepping on. People can be superstitious and weird about insane things.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

thats a japanese thing to start with and it has context of coming from imagebroads, not really the same thing as “the western criminal currency that mocks ____ with its currency symbol”

Because it’s hiragana, this has nothing to do with the Chinese hanzi characters.

They are still sibling langues when written; this is not a thing you feel in English often but there is an example when spoken:


I’m ever so slightly worried about political aesthetics; liberty dollar was accused and convicted of counterfeiting likely because it was called liberty dollar or walter blocks “voluntary slavery” and the last time I was accused of supporting slavery was less then a week ago, believe me when your connected to something that fails at aesthetics its rather bad. And no one is really all that likely to pay attention until it does.

I know I havn’t finished that letter but digging up obscure primary source of my extremely niche political outlook will take some time; can you please just take my conclusion that its was 165 years at least of what your doing was functionally illegal, and the door bitcoin opened could a fluke

Someone should ask people who first lang was chinese or japanese, before it wins because its fun; because it being outlawed in china is a very real possibility and I would suggest minimizing it

For me it would be a bit difficult identifying it as a currency symbol.

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I strongly suggest we take the same approach as Bitcoin (see reference below).

Let it be picked by itself. Some places will use the smiley symbol, some variations of ‘g’ with a stripe and some, if not most, will simply write “x grins”, which certainly rolls nicely on both the tongue and keyboard.
Scroll through the thread below to see what I mean.

Bitcointalk thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=41.20
Bitcoin Wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_symbol

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this one has grown so much on me: ᵹ
42.93ᵹ

.23190ᵹ

21ᵹ

it looks so wizardy

777ᵹ

Also if not GRN then XD for currency ticker since it looks like a grinning emoji.

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I’m a huge fan of this one for a few reasons:

  1. It is both serious, and yet also in line with the playful wizard world themes that Grin is attributed with.
  2. It is in unicode 4.1’s phonetic extension which is pretty common for rendering in different devices and browsers.
  3. It is not technically a separate letter or symbol, but a stylized font for the letter “G”. Therefore it has no existing concept or sound associated with it.
  4. There are very few results (~40,000) for the symbol on Google - most of them are unicode listing sites, meaning it would be very easy to associate this symbol with the Grin brand.
  5. It’s capitalized version, is simply the same symbol but larger. Unlike other cryptos that have the debate between their lowercase and uppercase versions of the letter, this one would be consistent.

Overall, it’s a very compelling case for ᵹ.

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I was neutral / “meh” to the suggestion before, but your arguments tipped me over to “mildly positive”. :slight_smile:

Thanks for outlining these so clearly. :+1:

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Is it really necessary to use an existing character? I mean, Bitcoin gained an exclusive one with Unicode 10.0 (that one --> ₿), so if Grin succeeds and become a huge known and used currency, it may gain its exclusive one too. That’s why I suggested that logo (Grin Logos for Community Consideration, also attached in this post). It resembles BTC one, and it may be an unique Unicode character futurely, not already used by anything else. It may take some time to happen, but I think it’ll be more worth than using an actually existing one that can eventually already being used for something else now.

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It is easier to find an existing symbol that isn’t used and doesn’t have an associated sound.

It took Bitcoin’s symbol a long time before it was included in unicode, and the symbol is something that it would be ideal to use right away.

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Good evening… given its cleverness, innovativeness and potential, I agree that devising a visual treatment, and the semiotics in general, for the Grin token should be accorded due consideration. That is not to say that it has not been to date, and, as is evident, several suggestions have been made relating to different aspects of the visual treatment. However, the focus has understandably been largely on proving and implementing the technology itself. To help progress the aspects related to the symbology, it may be worth considering them more rigidly from the point of view of the main different use cases (and apologies if this has been done already but I don’t see it). I think the main areas of usage are:

  1. A 3-letter currency code – for use by exchanges will almost certainly be required and one will be foisted upon the token if none is officially put forward by the project leadership.
  2. A symbol for the currency analogous to the $ for dollars, £ for pounds etc. – for making the token easier to denote in a single character i.e. the original reason such symbols evolved in the first place; while it may not be imperative, it would support and strengthen the eventual ‘brand’ for the token for PR purposes and raising awareness in general.
  3. A logotype – for promoting the concept in a more visually appealing way on website livery, promotional materials, stationery etc etc; it is generally accepted that about 65% of people are primarily visual learners and to reach a wider (i.e. not just tech) audience the requirement for visually memorable and appealing representation should not be underestimated.
    This thread seems to deal with the 1st and 2nd of these. I see there is a separate thread dedicated to the logo (logotype) so leaving that to one side I have jotted down a few thoughts on the former 2 cases. I am tending towards the principle that complexity does not necessarily equal profundity, and also trying to use a set of criteria as this may help provide an objective basis for ruling concepts in or out.

1.A 3-letter currency code – for use by exchanges will almost certainly be required and one will be foisted upon the token if none is officially put forward by the project leadership.

Possible criteria? 3 letters, not used by an existing token/currency, as self-evident as possible i.e. one could probably guess at it if one did not already know what it represented.

Possible solutions? The most obvious solution would seem to be GRN

  1. A symbol for the currency analogous to the $ for dollars, £ for pounds etc. – for making the token easier to denote in a single character i.e. the original reason such symbols evolved in the first place; while it may not be imperative, it would help in giving the token a strong brand for PR and raising awareness in general.

Possible criteria?

  1. Easy to write in 1 – 3 strokes maximum
  2. Sufficiently different from an existing token/currency
  3. Has some symbolic reference to the word or concept of Grin
  4. Distinct enough to be quickly recognizable
  5. Is easily reproducible
  6. Part of an existing character set (?) – the point to which the previous posted made ref.
  7. Others?

Possible solutions? Obviously the 2nd last of these criteria limits the possibilities considerably and was not a constraint for bitcoin but would help to ensure more accessibility and usability; if this is not considered necessary, many of the existing suggestions could be viable candidates. Many of these suggestions were based on stylized treatments of the letter ‘g’ in some shape or form, which seems sensible. However, I think several breach one or more of the above criteria.
For example, variations of G/g with vertical bar(s) seem too reminiscent of bitcoin’s symbol and may smack of “me too” or moreover, fail to attribute the originality to Grin that it deserves so opposes the criterion to be sufficiently different
Alternatives applying a horizontal bar(s) have also been suggested but the lowercase ‘g’ versions I saw seem to lack distinctiveness and do not retain the echo of a grinning face that the uppercase G does.
An alternative version I saw with an uppercase G looked difficult to reproduce – any unusual or highly stylized typeface will have this problem. Furthermore, the full length horizontal strikethrough can make the G loose its recognisability and/or resemble the euro (€) symbol.
Retaining the concept of the horizontal bar, a possible tweak could use a shorter floating horizontal bar and examples can be easily enough derived from a standard typeface also which would help to standardize it – here are a few rough ideas:
image

On the other hand, if it was desirable to retain the criterion of using a character from an existing character set, one possible solution could be to use Ğ. This is the latin capital letter G with a Breve; Unicode hex character code: 011E; the breve obviously resembles a smiling mouth, thus providing an extra connection to Grin.

Those are my two grins’ worth for now … I am interested to hear what other contributors think on this not insignificant topic, and particularly if there are other criteria that should be considered, or indeed, if some of those suggested are considered invalid…

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Acually, forget that G with the floating horiztonal bar. The other MW crypto Beam appears to have a denomination equal to 1 x 10^-6 of a Beam called a Groth which uses a symbol very similar to this G with the additional short horizontal bar.

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A comparison table for two of the currency symbol suggestions to date that seem to make most sense to me at any rate …

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VOTE on Grin's currency symbol

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last meeting:

I thought it was the other symbol? Why pick the second from the poll if most everyone was ambivalent between the two?

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Hi @0xb100d, the poll was non-binding. As per the poll instructions:

The vote results will guide a discussion as part of the Jan 17 governance meeting, where a decision will hopefully also be made.

As per the meeting notes, was the symbol that was adopted. You are welcome to independently verify this, the full chat transcript begins here.

As for your question:

Why pick the second from the poll if most everyone was ambivalent between the two?

It’s hard to say why exactly, but this was what happened at the meeting. I guess one symbol had to be picked in the end, and since the vote was non-binding, and several proposals were neck in neck, it was not obvious that the first from the poll would be the final decision.

If you feel this is wrong, you can petition for this decision to be reconsidered. A first step might be to make an argument for your case, and then ask for a point to be added to the agenda of the next governance meeting and see if you gather support for your proposal. Or you can refuse to use the symbol in protest. Or choose your own symbol that you think is the most appropriate and see if it gets adopted. This, and more, is all within your right as a member of the community.

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