About Bitcoin Sign
Bitcoin Sign is the Unicode character ₿ at codepoint U+20BF in the Currency Symbols block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
A capital B with two vertical strokes, for bitcoin. Unicode's annotation is four words long — "a cryptocurrency" — and that terseness is the most characteristic thing about the entry. It was encoded in Unicode 10.0 in 2017, after a first proposal in 2011 went nowhere and a second in 2015 succeeded. It has no named HTML entity, and it has no ISO 4217 code either: the active list published on 1 January 2026 carries 178 currency codes and none of them is bitcoin. In practice the ticker BTC does the work the sign was meant to do.
Typical uses
- Bitcoin amounts in typography that has the glyph
- Branding and interface labels, where the shape reads as a logo
- Overwhelmingly displaced in running text by the ticker BTC
At a glance
- U+20BF, Currency Symbols; Unicode 10.0; general category Sc
- East Asian Width Neutral; no named HTML entity — use ₿
- No ISO 4217 code — the character has no counterpart in the currency standard
- Bidirectional class ET, like every sign in this block
Historical Notes
Origins
A B with the doubled vertical stroke the block uses to mark a letter as money — the same device as the dollar and naira signs, applied to the initial of the name. What the character replaced is the interesting part: before the codepoint existed, sites borrowed other alphabets' letters, and one of those borrowings was contentious enough that the successful proposal had to argue against it at length.
Unicode
Encoded in Unicode 10.0, released June 2017. Only one character has been added to the Currency Symbols block since: U+20C0 SOM SIGN, in Unicode 14.0. A first proposal was filed in 2011 and did not proceed; a second, considerably more thorough, was accepted in November 2015.
No ISO code
ISO 4217 is the currency-code standard, and bitcoin is not in it. The active list published on 1 January 2026 contains 178 distinct codes covering national and supranational currencies, and no cryptocurrency appears among them. The unofficial ticker BTC — and the ISO-shaped XBT sometimes used in its place — carry no standards-body status.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Bitcoin Sign
To use the Bitcoin Sign symbol (₿) in HTML, insert the
entity ₿ directly into your markup. The decimal entity ₿ works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\20BF';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u20BF' evaluates to ₿. In Python source, write '\u20BF'.
The character encodes to E2 82 BF as UTF-8 bytes and 20BF as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8383.
This is a text-based Unicode character. It will render in the current font on most platforms. If a font lacks this glyph, the browser may show a placeholder or fall back to a system font.
Things to know
- No named HTML entity. Use ₿ or ₿.
- No ISO 4217 code. Currency-handling libraries keyed on ISO codes have no entry to look up, so bitcoin amounts generally travel through a separate code path from national currencies — including the decimal question, since ISO minor-unit data does not cover it.
- The character is from 2017, so font coverage is thinner than the block's older members. Anything older than that renders the fallback box, which is why interfaces tend to use an image or an icon font rather than the codepoint.
- Do not substitute the Thai baht sign ฿ (U+0E3F). It is a different character in a different script, and the substitution is exactly what the encoding proposal was written to end.
- East Asian Width Neutral; general category Sc; bidirectional class ET.
In the Wild
Two bitcoin-focused publications, on 3 August 2026, wrote the ticker instead of the character — neither used U+20BF at all:
- Bitcoin Magazine: "Wallet Flaw Exposes Years of Bitcoin Seeds After $70M in BTC Stolen", "Bitcoin Treasury Strategy Posts $8.2B Loss As BTC Price Suffered"
- CoinDesk: "Coldcard wallet losses may near $114 million", tagged "BTC 0.00%"
An Indian business site the same day quoted the price in rupees rather than in the sign: "Bitcoin Price ₹ 5968720". So the dollar and rupee signs appear in bitcoin coverage and the bitcoin sign does not. Pages change; this is what those three showed on the day.
FAQ
Does bitcoin have an ISO currency code?
No. The active ISO 4217 list published on 1 January 2026 carries 178 codes and none is a cryptocurrency. BTC and XBT are conventions, not standards.
Why did people use the Thai baht symbol?
Because bitcoin had no character of its own until 2017 and ฿ was the nearest available shape. The proposal that got U+20BF encoded argues at length that the two are unrelated designs.
Why does it render as a box?
The character dates from 2017, so fonts older than that have no glyph for it. Interfaces often use an icon instead for exactly this reason.
Is there an HTML entity?
Not a named one. Use ₿ or ₿.