But there is one thing I don't understand (among other things :D). The char "á" has a certain bit sequence for utf-8. The sequence is platform independent. The "á" literal has following bit sequence inside libbitcoin solution -61 -96 (I assume it is utf-8 because of utf-everywhere, why not?). -61 = 11000011 and -95 = 10100001 and this i exactly the bit patttern of U+00E1 in utf-8. Why is it even possible two have two different utf-8 bit pattern for the same char? Or is my understanding about encoding totally wrong?