Bitcoin · 2010–2025

How Herbert Sim became The Bitcoin Man

A drawing, a domain name and a gold necklace trace how a Singapore fashion publisher took Bitcoin to a different audience.

Herbert Sim (right) and Vishal Nigam at a RISE press conference in Hong Kong on 11 July 2019. Photo by Seb Daly/RISE via Sportsfile, published by RISEConf · CC BY 2.0. Web edition resized.

On 1 October 2025, Reuters photographer Edgar Su photographed Herbert Rafael Sim posing with his necklace at TOKEN2049 in Singapore. The caption identified him by a second name, The Bitcoin Man. Nine years earlier, readers of his blog could have recognised the figure from a drawing.

In a post dated 30 June 2016, Sim announced that he had acquired TheBitcoinMan.com. To mark the occasion, he drew himself wearing an oversized gold Bitcoin pendant. The domain had a practical job. People who remembered the name could type it in and find his writing. The drawing gave them something to remember before they knew what a blockchain was.

Sim already had experience finding readers. In a 2014 MyPaper interview reproduced by his publication, he recalled passing copies of a small fashion magazine to fellow students in Singapore. The magazine moved online as WardrobeTrendsFashion. In crypto, he faced a different publishing problem. Crypto Chain University, the research collection he says he founded in 2010, was aimed at readers who already knew enough to look for a paper. A newcomer had little reason to seek it out. His illustrated character was his attempt to reach that reader.

The public record also places Sim inside the exchange business. On 9 March 2018 he appeared on a panel at SYNC in Singapore. Huobi’s contemporary account identified him as global operations director of Huobi Pro and named the other panellists. That gives us a dated record of the capacity in which he spoke. His comments about exchanges during that period came from someone working for one.

By the time Ciaran Lyons interviewed Sim for Cointelegraph Magazine in 2024, the Bitcoin jewellery and the market predictions were both part of his public identity. Those predictions were Sim’s opinions. The more revealing detail for a history of Bitcoin is the one the Reuters photograph preserves. An emblem once drawn to bring strangers to a website had become an object a photographer could use to identify its wearer.

Original sources

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