Upcoming proposal for Bitcoin sign

[Richard Wordingham]

On Mon, 7 Sep 2015 09:26:59 -0700
Ken Shirriff <ken.shirriff at gmail.com> wrote:

> The bitcoin sign is unrelated to the baht in origin. The bitcoin sign
> was first used in an icon replacing
> <https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/3ca507a6eb1cecbf40a907a52c27128efb666ec0#diff-2563c1b5d707ccd97d7b2cfe66606d43>
> the software's "BC" logo with the bitcoin sign logo, showing the
> roots of the bitcoin sign are the letter B. There's no historical
> connection to the baht, unlike the multiple uses of $ which are
> historically related.

The bitcoin sign and the baht sign are very closely related.  Both are
a combination of 'B' and the vertical strokes of the dollar symbol.
Indeed, if you look at the first picture at 
http://www.goabroad.com/articles/study-abroad/thai-cuisine-the-spicy-truth ,
you can see a plain 'B' on the left and in the middle what looks like a
B with two strokes below.  A lot of handwritten baht signs end with a
rightward flourish from the centre.  It would seem that the preferred
visible currency sign in Thailand is actually the two-character string
".-"!  In a lot of cases, there's either no indicator of currency, or
the word is written out in full.

Perhaps a saving argument is the two forms of the pound sign - U+00A3
POUND SIGN and U+20A4 LIRA SIGN.  Proper blue five pound notes had the
two-barred form U+20A4 (which is how I learnt to write the pound
sign); as the notes became greener, their lesser value was indicated by
the use of the one-barred form U+00A3.  The code chart notes that the
preferred form for the lira is POUND SIGN, and I can tell you that my
preferred form for the pound sterling is the so-called LIRA SIGN.

Richard.