That was a fun read: nostalgic, highly recommended. Here are some highlights:
The labour theory of value:
"The value in them is that it becomes increasingly more difficult to create them until you reach the limit of 21 million bitcoins... that's the value," says Dr. Wettstein.
Chinese whispers:
The first purchase ever using bitcoins was for a pizza. One guy gave another guy "x" amount of bitcoins to buy him a tasty delivery. So many coins were used for the transaction today that pizza would be valued at 750 thousand dollars!
Note: the trade was 2 pizzas for 10000 BTC (at 750 USD/BTC, that's 3.75 million USD per pizza).Speculation on recent market movements:
That NDSU professor who contributed to this piece, Greg Wettstein, actually predicted that hackers were already trying to figure out how to get to miners digital wallets to take their bounty. And that might be part of the reason for the massive drop in Bitcoins value which occurred today.