The idea was to make a symbol that could be accurately duplicated by others by using concise sizes and ratios.

It would then be possible for folks to recreate the same symbol and use it as a logo and a currency symbol on any type of media they wanted.

I powered up Paint Shop Pro 7 and begun.

It took quite a bit of effort to make the whole design work together.

There were many mis-steps and deletions and restarts.

The hole shapes were made from a rectangle on the left, a smaller circle to the right of it and the upper curve made by using a circle the size of the B shape that curved between the top of the rectangle down to the top of the smaller circle.

The large circle was then cropped and the rectangle/circle/cropped-large-circle was cut horizontally to make up the upper portion of the hole.

It was then duplicated, mirrored vertically ( along the horizontal plane ) and combined with the upper hole shape.

These were then used to create the top hole shape and the right-hand-side B bumps.

Due to the instructions for the hole shapes not being as specific and exact as we wanted, those original instructions were never released.

I’ve recreated them from memory and may post them at some stage, however the updated version was more important.

Around mid-October 2010 I saw an opportunity to remake the Bitcoin symbol and logo again and improve upon the design.

It was approaching the 2nd anniversary of the release of the Bitcoin white paper.

I had bitboy go through the instructions until they were written clear enough for him to recreate it.

He apologised for the errors in his version because his drawing program kept snapping to grid or snapping to pixels so the actual sizes of some items were incorrect.

He’d also played around with the rounded shape to try and make it better and ended up distorting it a bit too much.

He said it took him so long to go through the instructions that he really didn’t want to go through them again to fix the stuff-up and asked if he could just post my own version.

I told him that the idea was for the community to see that someone new to the community could be productive and do something very useful even if they weren’t experts in the tech.

He was to post his version, even with the errors present.

I told him that most folks would never see the mistakes because the whole thing is going to be rotated onto a specific angle.

The updated instructions for the November 1st 2010 symbol/ logo were never released publicly because the instructions for generating the hole shape were just too harrowing for bitboy.

If he found it difficult, then many others would find them likewise.

They weren’t the easy-to-follow instructions I had wanted after all, so I thought I’d leave it until I can figure out a better way of creating the holes.

Due to circumstances, I never had a chance to get back to the symbol/ logo again.

I’ll only list the actual final instructions for duplicating the symbol — not the different attempts that were made trying to figure it out.

Further mention about the symbolism is listed at the end of the instructions.

It is assumed you will be using a drawing program that utilises Layers so that individual elements can be shown, hidden, moved, locked, unlocked, and deleted.

Make sure any “snap-to-grid” or “snap-to-pixel” has been turned off.

The shapes should snap to each other.

ToC