Poll Review: Do You Prefer XBT or BTC

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’.