A SYMBOLIC DAY

Once other community members got involved, however, and Satoshi no longer had to do everything, it was inevitable that certain elements of Bitcoin’s design would evolve – and its visual identity was one of the first components to receive a community upgrade.

On February 5th, 2010, Bitcointalk forum user “NewLibertyStandard” made two bold proposals: adopting the Thai baht symbol (฿) as Bitcoin’s official currency sign and using BTC as the three-letter currency code. The idea behind harnessing the ฿ symbol was to make Bitcoin akin to other global currencies such as $, € or ¥. The BTC proposal quickly caught on, but the symbol attracted some pushback at first.

Alternative ideas were floated, such as creating a new symbol to represent Bitcoin rather than stealing that of an existing currency. The advantage of NewLibertyStandard’s proposal, of course, was that it didn’t necessitate developing a new symbol and then waiting for the world to integrate it into their systems: the baht was already embedded into computer systems and smartphones the world over.

In the end, the community did gravitate to using the baht symbol – and it might have been a Bitcoin pioneer who helped settle it. Hal Finney responded to the thread: “Interestingly, the dollar sign originated with two vertical bars instead of one, according to several theories…,” seemingly supporting a variation of the baht symbol.

Later that month, Satoshi released a new Bitcoin logo, still styled like a gold coin but in place of the BC was the now-familiar “B” with two vertical strokes emerging from the top and bottom. This helped to differentiate it from the Thai baht (฿) where the single bar runs fully through, while broadly endorsing NewLibertyStandard’s original proposal.

The Year of Two Logos

While the new logo was clearly an improvement over its predecessor, not everyone was enamoured with it. Forum user ArrowJ grumbled “we could have something great” instead of something merely “fine.” They wouldn’t have long to wait, for 2010 was to prove a prolific year for Bitcoin logos. On November 1st, user “bitboy” made his first post on the forum and it was a significant one.

Gone was the gold coin. In its place was a flat, contemporary design with a vivid orange background and the B tilted to the right. It was an instant hit, with forum members praising the design. Within months, the orange B logo was being used everywhere and the gold coin designs were quietly obsoleted.

A few years later, security researcher Ken Shirriff completed the process by ensuring that the ₿ symbol was added to Unicode. He took on this mission, he recalls, after noting that “you couldn't type the Bitcoin symbol or put it in a document unless you pasted in an image. People were using ugly workarounds such as using the Thai Bhat symbol (฿) or B with a stroke (Ƀ). It was obvious to me that this flaw in Unicode should be rectified. I was familiar with the Unicode process after successfully submitting an obscure 1960s mainframe computer character, so I was the right person to fix this.”

He adds: “Fortunately, the Unicode committee accepted my proposal and the Bitcoin character was added to Unicode 10.0. Bitcoin supporters on Reddit were thrilled and generously sent me bitcoin as thanks, which I donated to fund wells in Africa. It took a couple of years, however, before the Bitcoin character was added to fonts and people could actually see it and not just a box.”

With this milestone, the evolution of Bitcoin’s design was complete – from BC to ₿.