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It’s Sunday, and you know what that means. It’s time to take a look at last week’s poll!
In that poll we asked the seemingly age-old question of what the bitcoin abbreviation should be. Most commonly in the community, XBT or BTC have been widely used. But because bitcoin is decentralized, there has been both agreement and disagreement on standards and conventions, since there’s no one authority to say what is or is not proper.
So getting back to the results, there were a total of 308 votes (and you can look for the weekly poll in the lower right of every page if you’re interested). A whopping 275 voters, or 89.3 percent, said they prefer the BTC abbreviation. The other 10.7 percent (33 votes) were for XBT as the preferred abbreviation.
You’ll notice a mix of abbreviation usage when it comes to businesses in the space. For example, a website like Blockchain.info uses BTC, whereas an exchange like Kraken will go by XBT.
It even goes far beyond this, with mixed usage of the bitcoin symbol and denominations.
Establishing a standard
The Bitcoin Foundation recently announced the formation of a Standards Committee to address this very issue. With the recognition that bitcoin is decentralized, the committee’s tasks are to make recommendations on which symbol, abbreviation, denominations should be used.
(Full disclosure: I am a member of that committee.)
Moving forward, it will be interesting to see developments on this front, but for now it would appear bitcoin users are quite comfortable using ‘BTC’.
Let’s take a look at this week’s poll, which has nothing to do with standards. It comes in the wake of a Wall Street Journal interview with Mark Karpeles last week, who said that he was frustrated with himself but declined to disclose why Mt. Gox fell to its knees. Which brings me to the poll itself:
[poll id=”15″]
DennisonBertram 
Singapura 
BTC is more popular for sure- but it was conceived in a time when we weren’t thinking of future implications. XBT is more standard and falls in line with things like XAU (gold). People are free to quote BTC in casual conversation, but XBT should be the official standard.
XAU is a commodity and the symbol for gold is Au which is only 2 letters, hence the added “X”. Bitcoin should be a currency (even in some jurisdictons it is still considered a commodity). BTC would therefore be more future proof.