How Bitcoin Got Into Unicode

On June 20, 2017, the Unicode Consortium released version 10.0 of the Unicode Standard. Among the 8,518 new characters added in that release was a small but historically significant entry: U+20BF, the Bitcoin sign. Rendered as the familiar B with two vertical strokes through it, the character joined the ranks of the dollar sign, the euro sign, and the yen sign in the official encoding standard used by virtually every computing device on Earth. Getting there took six years of proposals, rejections, community lobbying, and technical debate.

The First Proposal: 2011

The idea of adding a Bitcoin symbol to Unicode emerged almost as soon as Bitcoin itself gained a meaningful user base. In 2011, just two years after Satoshi Nakamoto published the first client, members of the Bitcoin community began discussing the possibility on the BitcoinTalk forums. The reasoning was straightforward: if Bitcoin was a currency, it should have a currency symbol that could be typed, transmitted, and displayed on any device without relying on images or custom fonts.

The initial informal proposals to the Unicode Consortium were rejected. The Technical Committee (UTC) had well-established criteria for accepting new characters, and Bitcoin did not meet them. The objections were specific. The UTC questioned whether Bitcoin had sufficient real-world usage to justify encoding. They noted that Bitcoin was not recognized as legal tender by any government, making its classification as a "currency" debatable under the committee's guidelines. They also observed that no central authority had officially designated a symbol, meaning there was no stable, authoritative reference point.

These were not arbitrary hurdles. The Unicode Standard is permanent. Once encoded, a character cannot be removed. The committee needed confidence that Bitcoin's symbol would remain relevant and that its form was settled.

The Community Campaign

The rejections did not end the effort. Instead, they galvanized the Bitcoin community. Throughout 2012 and 2013, forum threads on BitcoinTalk tracked the Unicode proposal process in detail. Community members studied the UTC's published criteria for new characters and worked to build a case that addressed each objection systematically.

One critical requirement was demonstrating widespread, independent usage of the symbol across multiple contexts. The community gathered evidence from exchange platforms, merchant point-of-sale systems, financial publications, and software applications that had independently adopted the same symbol: the B with two vertical strokes. This evidence of organic, decentralized convergence on a single glyph was a powerful argument. Nobody had mandated this design. Thousands of uncoordinated actors had simply arrived at the same visual convention.

Another requirement was showing that the symbol could not be adequately represented by existing Unicode characters. The closest candidate was U+0E3F, the Thai baht sign, which looks superficially similar to a B with a vertical stroke. But the baht sign has a single stroke, not two, and using it to represent Bitcoin would have created confusion with an existing national currency. The community demonstrated that no existing character could serve as an appropriate stand-in.

Ken Shirriff's Technical Contribution

A pivotal moment in the campaign came when Ken Shirriff, a computer historian and engineer known for his work reverse-engineering vintage computing hardware, took up the cause. Shirriff was not just an advocate. He did the painstaking technical work of preparing a formal Unicode proposal that met the committee's exacting standards.

Shirriff's proposal, submitted in 2015, was a model of thoroughness. It included typographic specifications for the glyph, documented examples of the symbol's use across platforms and publications, addressed each of the UTC's prior objections, and provided evidence that the symbol had achieved stable, widespread recognition. The proposal drew on Bitcoin's growing mainstream adoption, including its use by major financial news outlets and its recognition by regulatory bodies in multiple countries.

Beyond the Unicode proposal, Shirriff contributed directly to Bitcoin's codebase. He worked on implementing the Bitcoin symbol in the Bitcoin Core client, ensuring that the software itself could properly render and handle the character once it was encoded. This ground-level technical work complemented the political and bureaucratic effort at the Unicode Consortium level.

The Acceptance: Unicode 10.0

The UTC debated the proposal across multiple meetings in 2016 and early 2017. The turning point was the volume of independent usage evidence. By 2016, Bitcoin had a market capitalization exceeding ten billion dollars, and the two-stroke B appeared on exchange interfaces, ATMs, hardware wallets, and financial charts worldwide.

On June 20, 2017, Unicode 10.0 was released with the Bitcoin sign at code point U+20BF in the Currency Symbols block, alongside the dollar sign (U+0024), the euro sign (U+20AC), the pound sign (U+00A3), and the yen sign (U+00A5). Bitcoin became the first decentralized, non-government-issued currency to receive a Unicode character.

The significance was both practical and symbolic. Any text system supporting Unicode 10.0 could now display the Bitcoin symbol as a standard character. And the encoding represented institutional recognition from one of computing's most important standards bodies.

Font Support and Rendering

Acceptance into Unicode was only the beginning of the practical journey. A code point is an abstract assignment. For users to actually see the Bitcoin symbol on their screens, fonts must include a glyph for U+20BF, and operating systems must ship those fonts.

Font support rolled out gradually. Apple added support in macOS High Sierra and iOS 11.1. Microsoft included it in Segoe UI updates for Windows 10. Google added it to Noto Sans and Roboto on Android and Chrome OS.

As of 2026, font support for U+20BF is widespread on current-generation devices. Web developers can use the character directly in HTML (as ₿), though a fallback font stack remains best practice for older systems that may display the "missing character" placeholder.

Broader Impact on Cryptocurrency Symbols

Bitcoin's successful Unicode encoding raised an obvious question: would other cryptocurrencies follow? The short answer, nearly a decade later, is no. No other cryptocurrency has been added to the Unicode Standard. Ethereum's diamond, Litecoin's L, and every other crypto symbol remain unencoded.

The barrier is the same one Bitcoin faced in 2011, amplified by the proliferation of tokens. Most cryptocurrency symbols are too new, too unstable in design, or too niche. Ethereum is the strongest candidate, but the Ethereum Foundation has never formally pursued encoding.

Bitcoin's Unicode acceptance remains singular. In a standard tracing its roots to ancient scripts and the collected writing systems of human civilization, a symbol created by an anonymous designer on an internet forum now sits permanently alongside the currencies of nations.