The First Bitcoin Price

On October 12, 2009 — nine months after the Genesis Block — Bitcoin was traded for the first time.

The price: $0.0008 per coin. Not a penny. Not a fraction of a penny. Less than a tenth of a cent.

A Finnish developer named Martti Malmi sold 5,050 Bitcoin to someone called NewLibertyStandard for $5.02 via PayPal. The entire Bitcoin supply that existed at that moment was worth roughly the same as a cheap sandwich.

Neither of them knew what they were holding.

The price had been calculated by dividing the cost of electricity used to mine the coins by the number of coins produced. It was a curiosity. A proof of concept. Something a small circle of cypherpunks and cryptography enthusiasts played with in their spare time.

At that first price, one million Bitcoin — roughly what Satoshi holds — was worth $800. Today that same amount is worth tens of billions of dollars.

This isn’t a story about getting rich. Most of the people who held Bitcoin at that price sold long before it reached anything meaningful. The ones who held through a decade of volatility, ridicule, crashes, and multiple declarations of death — they’re a different story entirely.

But the number itself tells you something. Every technology that eventually changes the world starts somewhere laughably small. The internet was once a curiosity used by academics. Email was considered a toy.

Something that costs $0.0008 today could be ignored. Something that costs $0.0008 and becomes $100,000 — that tells you something about what the world eventually decides matters.

Tomorrow: the pizza that changed everything.

— The Daily Bit