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A capital B with two vertical strokes, used for bitcoin.
Also known as: BTC symbol, Crossed B
The bitcoin sign marks amounts in bitcoin. Unlike state currency signs it arose from a user community rather than a central bank, and was added to Unicode in 2017.
Was adopted by the bitcoin user community before being encoded in Unicode in 2017 — a currency sign that emerged from use rather than from a monetary authority.
2017 onward · Contexts: Software
Follows an old convention rather than inventing one. A letter crossed by parallel bars is how currency signs have been made for centuries — the pound's L, the yen's Y, the euro's epsilon — and the double-barred B was chosen to sit in that tradition.
Was encoded in Unicode later than its use began, so documents and systems created before the character existed substituted the letter B, a Thai baht sign, or an image — which is why the sign still renders as a box in older software and archived pages.
Encoded in Unicode 10.0, 2017 · Contexts: Software
Related forms that are not treated as separate canonical symbols — see our variant rules.
Single-bar form
A B with one crossbar, used in some early logos before the double-bar form settled.
A capital B with two vertical strokes extending above and below the letter.