TIL that the original Bitcoin logo was designed by Satoshi himself and was incredibly ugly - and that the current logo was created by Bitboy

Okay, the second half of the title is slight clickbait (but true). Let me explain:

There have been three different Bitcoin symbols in use since its inception. The original one was designed by Satoshi and looked like this - a picture made out of a few pixels, depicting a gold coin with "BC" on it, looking really, really awful. I think it's pretty interesting that Satoshi himself designed the logo as a gold coin, as I've seen many people complain over the years if the media illustrate stories about crypto with physical coins with crypto logos on them, because that's a wrong depiction. I always thought that was weird criticism - it's difficult to illustrate crypto stories, are they supposed to print a picture of code if they need a picture? - but it's interesting that Satoshi himself used a physical coin as a logo.

The second design was also by Satoshi and was presented on the Bitcointalk forum on February 24, 2010 (archived version because the pictures don't work with the current one). It's closer to the current one, still a gold coin, but with the ₿ on it.

The third and final design, the white ₿ on orange background, was presented about 8 months later, on November 1, 2010 (again, archived version for the same reason as above) on Bitcointalk - by Bitboy. Okay, not that Bitboy, but a forum user with that name on Bitcointalk. Seemingly a pretty random user that only made a few posts on the forum. Crazy to think that the logo of a trillion-dollar-asset was not designed by a graphic designer but by a random guy on a forum. He said he was inspired by the Mastercard logo.

I think the current logo still looks quite good almost 12 years later, and I'm glad we didn't stick with the Satoshi logos!