A decades-old computer character standard has been updated with a symbol for bitcoin.

The Unicode Consortium unveiled Unicode version 10.0 today, which includes the bitcoin "B" symbol. Overall, the update includes 8,518 characters, along with 56 new emojis.

The move comes more than a year and a half after the Unicode Consortium, which oversees the Unicode computing text standard, approved a proposal that itself constituted a years-long process. Efforts toward a bitcoin Unicode symbol date back to as early as 2011.

The proposal, submitted by technology blogger Ken Shirriff, was actually the second to be considered by the Consortium. An earlier push by Sander van Galoven of the Netherlands was rejected by the organization.

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