$ is used to represent dozens of local "dollars", not just USD. That's why you use "USD" when specificity matters. There's nothing wrong with "BTC" when you need to type something out about Bitcoin. Specialized symbols in font is not a scalable solution...
Unfortunately that ship has sailed. The B with the two vertical lines through it (akin to the dollar sign) is "the Bitcoin symbol", no matter what other kinds of symbols people come up with.
Not all national currencies have a symbol, so to speak. A lot of times you just abbreviate the currency a certain standard way, so 5 btc, as written a lot, is just fine and widely accepted.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_symbol" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_symbol</a><p>Examples:<p>Indonesian rupiah - Rp<p>Guatemalan quetzal - Q<p>Lithuanian centas - ct
Previously discussion of this same symbol, Ƀ:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5451084" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5451084</a>
> “How does everyone feel about the B symbol with the two lines through the outside? Can we live with that as our logo?”<p>Yeah, let's just stick to what Satoshi recommended.
The author of this article doesn't seem to realize that a Unicode character is harder to enter than an image. For example, on Microsoft Windows, it appears that you would have to:<p>1. Google "enter unicode character"<p>2. Read <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_input" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_input</a> all the way down to the "Hexadecimal input" section<p>3. Manually set a registry key<p>4. Reboot your system<p>5. Correctly convert 243 to hexadecimal<p>6. Hold the Alt key, press + on the numeric keypad, and then enter the desired hexadecimal value.<p>Inserting an image is something that people are much more likely to already know, or be able to easily figure out.
I think this is the right idea, especially since the symbol's already in unicode - regardless, I think the two vertical lines on a B has gained too much traction to topple it at this stage.
This is not the kind of thing you want to advertise via website. There is an actual Bitcoin community and the idea is to convince influential people in that community to follow your approach. If you put it on a website and advertise it outside of the community, then you just confuse people who don't know Bitcoin very well on one side, and make a lot of reparation work for the actual Bitcoin community on the other hand. I don't know but this just seems to be an inefficient approach.