Re:Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra
by osullivj on Tuesday June 18, 2019 @09:31AM
(#20212746)
Indeed. Libra, solarii, denarii == pounds, shillings, pennies in the old pre 1970 British system. Sometimes referred to as LSD.
A minor correction: librae, solidi, denarii. Solidi were so called, according to wikipedia, because (at first) they were solid gold.
Solidus would also be a decent name for a stablecoin!
Re:Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra
by Freak_NL on Tuesday June 18, 2019 @02:55PM
(#20216946)
> Solidus would also be a decent name for a stablecoin!
Its inevitable currency symbol is already part of the Unicode standard: /
https://unicode-table.com/en/002F/
An interesting related titbit: the Japanese currency sign for the Yen (¥) used to be encoded as the ASCII backslash (\) in the pre-Unicode era. Japanese fonts simply put the Yen-sign there.
And on the Japanese version of Windows, the yen symbol was the path separator, right? I vaguely remember this:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20051014-20/?p=33...
Re:Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra
by tryptophan on Tuesday June 18, 2019 @10:25AM
(#20213347)
Fun fact, this is also why the british pound has the symbol £.
"Libra" is the latin name of what is now known as the "pound" and used in many Latin-rooted languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian come to mind) to refer to pound related currencies, including the British pound sterling ("libra esterlina") and similar currencies from Egypt to Lebanon to Gibraltar pound. It was also behind many discontinued currencies from the past, ie. the Italian Lira or the French Livre.
IMHO a bad choice in naming for something you want to call "new".