From Dollar Signs to Digital Symbols

Every currency needs a symbol. The dollar has $, the euro has EUR, the pound has GBP, and the yen has JPY. When cryptocurrency arrived, its creators faced a fundamental question: should digital money borrow from the visual language of traditional currency, or invent something entirely new? The answers they chose reveal deep philosophical divisions within the crypto movement.

The Origin of the Dollar Sign

Before examining crypto symbols, it helps to understand where the most famous currency symbol in the world actually came from. The origin of the dollar sign ($) remains genuinely debated among historians, with several competing theories.

The most widely accepted explanation traces it to the Spanish peso, also known as "pieces of eight." In colonial-era accounting, the abbreviation "ps" was used for pesos. Over time, scribes began writing the "S" over the "P," and the curved part of the P eventually simplified into a single vertical stroke through the S. Documentary evidence from the 1770s shows American merchants using this shorthand in their ledgers.

An alternative theory suggests the symbol derives from the Pillars of Hercules depicted on Spanish colonial coins, where two pillars were wrapped with S-shaped banners. Another proposes it comes from "US" overlaid, with the bottom of the U eventually disappearing.

Whatever its true origin, the dollar sign achieved something remarkable: it became a universal shorthand not just for the US dollar, but for the concept of money itself. That cultural power is exactly what Bitcoin's creators sought to harness.

Bitcoin's B with Two Strokes

When Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper in October 2008, the currency symbol question was still open. The early community experimented with various representations before settling on what is now one of the most recognizable symbols in technology: a capital B with two vertical strokes through it.

The reference to the dollar sign is unmistakable and intentional. The two vertical strokes through the B mirror the two strokes sometimes drawn through the S in the dollar sign. This was a statement: Bitcoin is money. Not a technology experiment, not a protocol, not a platform — money. The symbol anchored Bitcoin's identity as a currency first and everything else second.

The Bitcoin symbol was refined by the anonymous designer known as Bitboy in November 2010, who tilted the B fourteen degrees clockwise and placed it on an orange circle. But the underlying symbolism — a letter with strokes, just like $ — remained the foundation.

In June 2017, Bitcoin achieved a milestone that no other cryptocurrency has matched: the Bitcoin sign (B with two strokes) was accepted into the Unicode Standard as U+20BF (₿). This placed Bitcoin's symbol alongside $, EUR, GBP, JPY, and other established currency signs in the world's text encoding standard. It was a quiet but profound moment of legitimacy.

Litecoin's L with a Stroke

Litecoin, launched in October 2011 by Charlie Lee as "the silver to Bitcoin's gold," adopted the same convention with striking consistency. Its symbol is a capital L with a single horizontal stroke through it, rendered at an angle.

The stroke through the L serves no typographic purpose other than to echo the convention established by currency symbols like $ and GBP (the pound sign GBP is literally an L with a stroke, derived from the Latin word "libra"). By adopting this convention, Litecoin reinforced its identity as a currency — a lighter, faster version of Bitcoin, but fundamentally the same kind of thing.

This was a deliberate branding choice. Lee positioned Litecoin not as a competitor to Bitcoin but as a complement, and the parallel symbol design reinforced that relationship visually.

Ethereum's Departure

Ethereum chose a radically different path. When Vitalik Buterin conceived Ethereum in 2013 and launched it in 2015, the project was never meant to be "just" a currency. Ethereum was a programmable blockchain, a platform for decentralized applications, a "world computer." Its symbol needed to reflect that broader ambition.

The Ethereum logo — an octahedron composed of triangular planes, resembling a diamond viewed from above — contains no letter, no stroke, and no reference to any existing currency symbol. The native currency is called "ether" and uses the abbreviation ETH, but the symbol itself is purely geometric.

This was a philosophical statement as clear as Bitcoin's. Where Bitcoin said "I am money" through its dollar-sign-inspired symbol, Ethereum said "I am something new" through its abstract geometry. The diamond shape suggests value without explicitly referencing currency. It evokes a crystal, a gemstone, a mathematical solid — not a banknote.

The Philosophical Divide

The choice between currency-style symbols and pure geometric marks maps onto one of the deepest divides in cryptocurrency ideology.

Currency-first projects like Bitcoin and Litecoin see blockchain technology primarily as a way to create better money — decentralized, censorship-resistant, with a fixed supply and no central bank. Their symbols borrow from fiat currency conventions because they want to be understood as money. The stroked letters are a visual argument: we belong in the same category as dollars and pounds.

Platform-first projects like Ethereum, Polkadot, and Cosmos see blockchain as a general-purpose technology that happens to involve tokens. Their abstract symbols deliberately avoid currency references because they do not want to be limited by the "money" frame. An octahedron can represent a computing platform, a network, an ecosystem — things that a B-with-strokes cannot.

This divide is not merely aesthetic. It reflects genuine disagreements about what cryptocurrency is for, who its audience is, and how it should relate to the existing financial system. Bitcoin maximalists who believe Bitcoin will replace fiat currencies naturally gravitate toward symbols that echo fiat conventions. Ethereum developers building decentralized applications naturally prefer symbols that suggest technological infrastructure.

Borrowing and Rejecting: What the Choices Mean

When a cryptocurrency borrows design conventions from fiat currency, it makes a claim about its own nature and aspirations. It says: we are the next evolution of something you already understand. This approach reduces friction for mainstream adoption because new users can immediately categorize the asset.

When a cryptocurrency rejects those conventions, it makes a different claim: we are not an evolution of old money but an invention of something fundamentally new. This approach appeals to technologists and early adopters who are drawn to novelty rather than familiarity.

Neither approach is inherently superior. Bitcoin's currency-style symbol helped it become the dominant "digital money" narrative. Ethereum's abstract symbol helped it become the dominant "programmable blockchain" narrative. Each symbol did exactly what it needed to do for its project's specific mission.

The dollar sign took centuries to evolve from accounting shorthand to universal symbol. Crypto symbols are only a decade and a half old. The conventions being established now — which letters get strokes, which shapes become standard, which colors become associated with which concepts — are the foundations of a visual language that will define how the world sees digital value for generations to come.