In the Steemd.com/witnesses overview page a column exists to reflect the "bias" of the witness in regards to the current Steem marketprice she/he submits.
'To supply regular pricefeed updates' is a job for the witnesses, in order to reach consensus in regards to the price of Steem (which is used if you use for example the 'Convert to Steem' in your wallet.
As a kind of default standard, witnesses supply these 'pricefeed updates' by using the quote of '1.000 Steem' and then their calculated price for that quote. Witnesses can adjust the price with a discount or a bias to reflect additional calculations / price algo's and/or their personal opinion of where the price should go or should be. These however where sofar mostly calculated into the 'price' parameter part of the 'pricefeed updates'.
However this is not really transparent and therefore some witnesses started to follow @blocktrades pricefeed/quote setup and publish the 'pricefeed' value as a direct result of the current marketplace calculations and calculate their own 'bias/discount' into the 'quote'-parameter. Which leads to a separation of the market-price and the 'bias %' of the witness and more transparency in this matter. I think i will move towards this system soon as well with my witness roelandp.
So far the introduction, let's move to the gist, shall we?
I noticed that in the aforementioned witness overview 'bias / quote'' column the dollar sign ($) is used, just like in the price column. However, the Price column value is in SBD and the Quote column value is in Steem. To different currencies, with the same currency symbol, to me doesn't sound logical, although I understand it from a design point of view to have a currency symbol.
I started searching across the Unicode tables to find another $ like currency symbol which had some resemblance with the Steem (St-part) as well.
Quite some symbols with S like figures can be found, like:
- ⳽
- ꒚
- ꗟ
- Ȿ
- Ꞩ
In the end I think the following symbol for indicating Steem on a keyboard based text seem fitting: "latin small letter s with swash tail" (U+023F):
ȿ
Why this symbol?
- The tail hints to the horizontal bar of Steem's second letter T.
- The symbol is part of the Latin Extended B and therefore widely supported by browsers and default fonts.
- Tested on Android, iPhone, Mac, Windows.
Originally I had another symbol in mind, the Ꞩ, however this Unicode symbol is part of the Latin Extended D collection and has far less support amongst default fonts, resulting in ?-garbled characters on many occasion and not being able to find it in Design programs such as Photoshop, Sketch and Illustrator.
How to type this symbol on your keyboard?
(Was asked by @firepower). Of course you could visit this page every time and or copy it from other places. But if you want to type it yourself here is how you do it:Windows
- In Microsoft Word you can insert Unicode characters by typing the hex value of the character (023f) then hitting Alt key+ X
- Holding down the ALT key and typing the plus sign on the numeric keypad followed by the character value sequence: 023f
Apple Mac
- Choose Unicode Hex Input as keyboard instead of language (Sys prefs > Keyboards > Input sources (search Unicode)
- Hold down the ALT key and type the character sequence '023f'.
Android / iPhone
- Install an application for your phone by searching 'Unicode'. Find the code by searching for '023f'
- Copy paste the symbol 'ȿ' in a notepad app somewhere or store it as a contact.
Additional details of the ȿ:
| Unicode Code Point | U+023F |
| Script | Latin |
| Category | Lowercase Letter |
| Block | Latin Extended-B |
| HTML Entity (Decimal) | ȿ |
| HTML Entity (Hexadecimal) | ȿ |
| URL Escape Code | %C8%BF |
Encodings:
| HTML Entity (Decimal) | ȿ |
| HTML Entity (Hexadecimal) | ȿ |
| URL Escape Code | %C8%BF |
| UTF-8 (hex) | 0xC8 0xBF (c8bf) |
| UTF-8 (binary) | 11001000:10111111 |
| UTF-16/UTF-16BE (hex) | 0x023F (023f) |
| UTF-16LE (hex) | 0x3F02 (3f02) |
| UTF-32/UTF-32BE (hex) | 0x0000023F (0000023f) |
| UTF-32LE (hex) | 0x3F020000 (3f020000) |
| Octal Escape Sequence | \310\277 |
Update: Implemented as a test by @roadscape on Steemd Witness Overview:
What do you think? Does the 'ȿ' seem like a fitting symbol for Steem to you?
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Come meet me at SteemFest and vote for my recently rebranded 'witness'roelandp #35
cheers! ꞦꝋꜫꝲꜹꞤꝱꝕ