9 min read
It’s been emblazoned on buses, engraved on physical coins, and plastered across shop windows the world over. The Bitcoin logo, a slanted B in a jolly orange circle (hex code #F6911D, Pantone 1495 C, if you’re interested) has become a marketing phenomenon—and a vital tool in promoting the world’s biggest cryptocurrency.
Creating a globally-recognized logo that can be picked out at a glance is no mean feat; the likes of Starbucks and Apple spend millions on teams of dedicated graphic designers, brainstorming and workshopping even the slightest tweaks to their logos.
Bitcoin’s logo has achieved that level of recognition with no one team overseeing the design process—let alone a corporate behemoth’s marketing budget.
But who actually created Bitcoin’s famous logo? And can it endure when so much has changed since it was created?
The first Bitcoin logo was designed by none other than the cryptocurrency’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Nakamoto’s first iteration of the logo appeared soon after Bitcoin’s launch in early 2009. It depicts a gold coin, embossed with the letters “BC.”
The first iteration of the Bitcoin logo. Image: Satoshi Nakamoto
It’s an example of the design philosophy of skeuomorphism, in which digital objects are designed to resemble their real-world counterparts. At the time, the style was very much in vogue; Satoshi’s Bitcoin logo came just two years after the launch of Apple’s iPhone, whose original operating system UI leaned heavily on skeuomorphic design (it, like the Bitcoin logo, has since been revised in a more minimalist style).
Adopting that design philosophy had knock-on effects, too; some have argued that Satoshi’s original depiction of Bitcoin as a gold coin indicates that he’d conceived of the cryptocurrency as “digital gold” from the outset. Whether the icon really is referencing the monetary system of “metallism,” in which value derives from the exchange value of a commodity—or whether Satoshi was just following then-current design trends—is open to question.
Enthusiasts were able to help Satoshi Nakamoto iterate on his design via the Bitcoin Talk Forum. Image: Bitcoin Talk Forum
Of course, Bitcoin’s ethos is all about decentralization, and with the advent of the Bitcoin Talk Forum in 2010, other users soon added their voices to the conversation around the Bitcoin logo.
Some advocated for adopting the currency symbol of the Thai baht, ฿; others argued for a symbol that wasn’t duplicating another currency. Even the ampersand (&) was suggested at one point. One idea that did gain traction was to add a “T” to the “BC”; to this day, Bitcoin’s three-letter currency code is “BTC”.
Eager to please, Satoshi updated his logo design in February 2010. Riffing on the Thai baht concept, the revised logo depicts the now-famous “B” with two vertical strokes.
The revised Bitcoin logo, showing the iconic "B". Image: Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi's revised logo is interesting in light of comments by early Bitcoin pioneer and possible Satoshi candidate Hal Finney, who noted that “Interestingly, the dollar sign originated with two vertical bars rather than one, according to several theories.”
Some of the Forum’s users continued to criticize Satoshi’s efforts, however, claiming that the design lacked professional polish.
Then, in November 2010, a new Bitcoin Forum user, “Bitboy,” offered some improvements to Nakamoto’s design, and posted his free graphics to the public domain.
Bitboy's revised Bitcoin logo (Image: Bitboy)
Retaining Nakamoto’s “B”, Bitboy rendered it in white and put it on a flat, bright orange circle, tilting it so that it leaned right. The double strokes were tweaked, too; instead of cutting through the middle of the “B,” they poke out from the top and bottom.
This was to become Bitcoin’s logo over the next decade.
Notably, Bitcoin’s logo now resembled that of other payment methods—leaving no doubt about its intended use.
Bitboy's post with the designs for the current logo. Image: Bitcoin Talk Forum
One forum user compared the new design to the Mastercard logo, and Bitboy answered that this had, in fact, been his inspiration.
He said he was no fan of credit cards, but that it was “all about perception when it comes to consumer confidence and behavior.”
As with Nakamoto, the identity of Bitboy remains unknown, but others have claimed a part in the process. In 2017, a Medium post author, Phil Wilson, claimed that he was involved in both the Bitboy design and Nakamoto’s 2010 version.
He also claimed that the design was imbued with symbolism. For instance, the number eight crops up multiple times within the logo. Not only does it resemble a B, but the letter rotated clockwise is at 13.88 degrees, and the dimensions of the rectangles in the design had a length of 12.5 (one-eighth of 100).
However, Wilson has not produced proof to back up his claims, so there’s some doubt over the extent of his involvement.
With the price of Bitcoin rising during the late 2020 bull run, it's thrown a spotlight on the cryptocurrency's smallest unit, the satoshi—named after its creator. The Bitcoin community has historically struggled to come to a consensus on a design for a "Satoshi symbol", with different suggestions including a combination of the letters "S" and "N", a mash-up of an S with the @ symbol ("s-at," get it?).
In November 2020, the community resurfaced another idea: the “pointy S” that children learn to draw at school, whose origins remain mysterious to this day (which, in its way, complements Bitcoin's enigmatic creator). Enthused by the idea, redditors on the r/bitcoin subreddit created a new "satoshi" logo mimicking the Bitcoin one, and even went so far as to 3D print coins emblazoned with the symbol.
The matter has been hotly debated for some years and, while there’s a lot of enthusiasm, there’s still little indication which, if any, design will prevail. It's likely to remain a moot point unless (or until) Bitcoin's price is significantly higher, meaning that people are using satoshis as a matter of routine.
While Bitboy’s design for the Bitcoin logo has endured, not everyone is happy to leave it at that.
One group, in particular, has lobbied to change the logo for the past six years. The “Bitcoin Symbol” movement has argued that, rather than a logo, what Bitcoin needs was a symbol—like the dollar, the euro, or the yen.
Their suggestion, first put forward in April 2014, was the letter Ƀ, which appears in several alphabets. Several Bitcoin startups adopted the new symbol, but it failed to take off.
The proposed Bitcoin symbol (Image: Bitcoin Symbol)
Their objections to the existing Bitcoin logo are twofold. On the one hand, they oppose the use of a logo on philosophical grounds, noting that, “Bitcoin [...] is a decentralized currency – it’s neither a brand nor a product or company, and what we need for representing Bitcoin is a symbol rather than a logo.”
On the other, they have practical concerns with using a logo instead of a symbol; they point out that currencies use symbols “like $, € or ¥, aiming to be used everywhere by everybody.” A symbol, they argue, is a Unicode character that can be easily rendered by many fonts on a variety of devices; a graphic logo, on the other hand, can’t.
The design proposed by the Bitcoin Symbol group on a billboard in San Jose, California. Image: Reddit
The Bitcoin Symbol movement’s arguments have lost some of their potency in recent years, as the Bitcoin logo has become ever more widely known and associated with the cryptocurrency.
In February 2019, Google added a variant of Bitboy’s Bitcoin symbol to its mobile keyboards, while a year later Twitter followed suit, adding a Bitcoin emoji to the #bitcoin hashtag. The Bitcoin logo, it seems, has itself become a symbol.
The Bitcoin logo’s stripped-back design is partially responsible, Bo Beaumont, Director of Original Nutter Design, a UK design agency specializing in logo and identity, told Decrypt. “Its simplicity and likeness to fiat-based currency icons such as $, £, and € cemented the design as a new digital currency in the general public’s mind," he said, adding that it doesn't make sense to revise it. “Maybe that doesn't matter now Bitcoin is a household name?”
A Bitcoin ATM in Germany. Image: Shitcoins Club
Not everyone’s a fan, though. Andrew Marriott, owner of design and branding studio The Logo Creative, didn’t have one good thing to say about Bitcoin’s logo. “To me, it’s bland, generic and unbalanced, and nowhere near the level of Nike or Fedex,” he told Decrypt. “A “B” made to represent a “$” sign is very uninspiring and generic. I’m not even sure why the icon is on a slant or why the type is displayed in italic form—it’s just not nice to look at!” he said, adding that it looks like “something you would find on fiverr.com.”
Despite the critics, Bitboy’s riff on Nakamoto’s 2010 vision endures. But for how much longer?
“The Bitcoin symbol (the stylized B) works because of its simplicity, and because of the monetary association of the double vertical lines, similar to currency signs such as the dollar, yen, euro, lira, etc. But there are aspects of the logo that could be improved,” David Airey, a logo designer, and the author of several books on logo design, told Decrypt.
“The slight clockwise tilt on the B creates a visual imbalance. While this fits with the unpredictability of the Bitcoin value, it’s not a look that inspires confidence,” he said.
“If there’s one thing I’d change above anything else it would be to straighten the B in the symbol.”
In future, then, will Bitcoin straighten itself out? If only tempering volatility was that simple.
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