Early days

[robertcarlyle]

Would it have been possible to buy 1000 usd of bitcoin in 2010 or earlier? If not then how to acquire this amount or more?

[Ziskinberg]

Would it have been possible to buy 1000 usd of bitcoin in 2010 or earlier? If not then how to acquire this amount or more?

It's possible since there were already exchanges around that year. Plus, aside from exchanges, you could also buy through P2P transactions.

Here’s a reply from one of the old members in the forum that should answer your question.

Buying BTC is easy today with sites like Coinbase but what was it like in 2010 and 2011?

New Liberty Exchange was up in 2009.  Mt. Gox came up in mid-2010 and took up a lot of the market until its eventual collapse in 2014.

It was also more common for people to mine at home, because specialised hardware was not yet available nor required.

What wallet did people use?

Bitcoin Core.  The blockchain was tiny then so it wouldn't have taken much effort (not that it really takes that much effort now).

you can also follow and read that thread for more information.

[Gooner0]

Would it have been possible to buy 1000 usd of bitcoin in 2010 or earlier? If not then how to acquire this amount or more?

yes definitely, although most exchanges that served that year no longer exist.

[God Of Thunder]

If I am not wrong, most people were able to mine Bitcoin with their CPU back then. I don't know exactly when the mining moved to GPU hardware and then ASICS, but I heard that it was possible to mine Bitcoin through CPU power. How else do you think people mined the blocks? I don't think Satoshi sold any of his mined Bitcoin back then. Some early miners sold their Bitcoin for a very low price.

As another member already said, there were already some exchanges. So, possibly some people also bought Bitcoin at that time. But mostly people acquired their Bitcoin for free. I wish I knew about Bitcoin back then. 

[freedomgo]

If I am not wrong, most people were able to mine Bitcoin with their CPU back then. I don't know exactly when the mining moved to GPU hardware and then ASICS, but I heard that it was possible to mine Bitcoin through CPU power. How else do you think people mined the blocks? I don't think Satoshi sold any of his mined Bitcoin back then. Some early miners sold their Bitcoin for a very low price.

As another member already said, there were already some exchanges. So, possibly some people also bought Bitcoin at that time. But mostly people acquired their Bitcoin for free. I wish I knew about Bitcoin back then. 

True, mining was possible back then but considering the price at the time, it's also easier to just buy Bitcoin, and in 2010 Bitcoin was worth less than a dollar, it was basically worthless. If we had seen it coming, maybe dropping $1,000 on Bitcoin back then wouldn’t have been a big deal. And if we had held onto it until now we’d be living the kind of life most people can only dream of.

As for me, when I first got into crypto, the name I kept hearing was Mt. Gox. Of course, I never got the chance to trade on that exchange since they shut down in early 2014 after people started panicking.

[FortuneFollower]

^ There may be lots of "missed opportunity" seen in our cases, but - Bitcoin is still out there and it will continue to grow.
We need to see the present times as the best opportunity there is, because we can act upon it now.
And push forward with this line of thought, in my opinion.

[Maslate]

^ There may be lots of "missed opportunity" seen in our cases, but - Bitcoin is still out there and it will continue to grow.
We need to see the present times as the best opportunity there is, because we can act upon it now.
And push forward with this line of thought, in my opinion.

I guess we can only call it an opportunity if it was presented to us early on and we chose to ignore it. what happened is, only a few people knew about Bitcoin back then and some believed in it and held onto it, and now they’re enjoying their fortune. As for Bitcoin’s growth, it’s definitely still expected to rise, but we shouldn’t expect it to grow at the same explosive rate as it did in the early days.

[FortuneFollower]

^ There may be lots of "missed opportunity" seen in our cases, but - Bitcoin is still out there and it will continue to grow.
We need to see the present times as the best opportunity there is, because we can act upon it now.
And push forward with this line of thought, in my opinion.

I guess we can only call it an opportunity if it was presented to us early on and we chose to ignore it. what happened is, only a few people knew about Bitcoin back then and some believed in it and held onto it, and now they’re enjoying their fortune. As for Bitcoin’s growth, it’s definitely still expected to rise, but we shouldn’t expect it to grow at the same explosive rate as it did in the early days.

In the retrospective, the current days would be seen as an opportunity by us and others too.
That's how I think about it.

[BenCodie]

Would it have been possible to buy 1000 usd of bitcoin in 2010 or earlier? If not then how to acquire this amount or more?

Undeniably harder due to less accessibility and liquidity, though peer to peer trading, currency exchangers (hence the currency exchange board on this forum), and early day exchange platforms all would have been able to facilitate this...though protections and staying safe would have inevitably have been harder.

[TravelMug]

Would it have been possible to buy 1000 usd of bitcoin in 2010 or earlier? If not then how to acquire this amount or more?

Yes that is very possible, you can even mine it around that time as well and have a lot of Bitcoin in you. However, we can't turn back the clock, and even if we have heard Bitcoin before, majority might not be interested on it in the beginning.

Right now if you wanted to acquire it then it's obvious that you need to have a lot of money to invest. Think of it as like Michael Saylor is doing, but majority of us doesn't have millions upon millions to invest and acquire a lot of Bitcoin. But you can still start your journey and still invest in which ever way you can.

[Gozie51]

Would it have been possible to buy 1000 usd of bitcoin in 2010 or earlier? If not then how to acquire this amount or more?

yes definitely, although most exchanges that served that year no longer exist. Poloniex is also one of those exchanges you can buy BTC.

Exchanges existed in the past where you can actually buy the quantity of btc you wanted but not quite a number of people believed btc until later in the year around 2015 when the price started growing rapidly.

I remember there was Coin Exchange which was one of the popular exchange but no longer existing. Poloniex is also one of those old exchanges you can buy btc from.

[robertcarlyle]

But between buying 1000 usd worth of bitcoin in 2009 maybe 2010 and acquiring like 3000 bitcoin or more in 2009, ehich of these would have been more realistic?

[DannyHamilton]

Would it have been possible to buy 1000 usd of bitcoin in 2010 or earlier? If not then how to acquire this amount or more?

May 22, 2010 two pizzas (A value of about $40) were exchanged for 10,000 BTC.

At that exchange rate, $1000 of BTC would be 250,000 BTC.
At that time, there were about 2,852,150 BTC in existence.

So, acquiring 250,000 BTC would mean acquiring about 8.8% of all existing bitcoins.

Could it be done?  I didn't know about Bitcoin yet in 2010, so someone else would probably be better able to answer. My guess is: Maybe. Probably not all in a single purchase though. You'd probably have to complete transactions with many individual. But to create such a large sudden demand would probably have driven the price up pretty quickly. In the end you'd probably have ended up with a lot less than 250,000 BTC as each individual purchase would significantly reduce the pool of bitcoins available for purchase and result in a higher price for the next purchase.

[ChiBitCTy]

It’s possible to buy 1000 in bitcoins right now. Now, depending on where you were when you first started buying bitcoins it was either very easy and inexpensive so to speak to buy 1000 bitcoins for a while there that may have cost you next to nothing in fact, in the early days back in 2010 there were what’s called faucets That actually gave away free bitcoins as crazy as that is to us now so yes, it was possible back in the day keep in mind no one had any idea if bitcoin would succeed let alone reach over $100,000 in value

[coolcoinz]

Would it have been possible to buy 1000 usd of bitcoin in 2010 or earlier? If not then how to acquire this amount or more?

May 22, 2010 two pizzas (A value of about $40) were exchanged for 10,000 BTC.

At that exchange rate, $1000 of BTC would be 250,000 BTC.
At that time, there were about 2,852,150 BTC in existence.

So, acquiring 250,000 BTC would mean acquiring about 8.8% of all existing bitcoins.

Could it be done?  I didn't know about Bitcoin yet in 2010, so someone else would probably be better able to answer. My guess is: Maybe. Probably not all in a single purchase though. You'd probably have to complete transactions with many individual. But to create such a large sudden demand would probably have driven the price up pretty quickly. In the end you'd probably have ended up with a lot less than 250,000 BTC as each individual purchase would significantly reduce the pool of bitcoins available for purchase and result in a higher price for the next purchase.

This answers the question in full.

I'd like to add that the first large bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox was launched in July 2010, so before that date it was almost impossible to buy bitcoin in large quantities, like the mentioned 250k, since people were trading on PayPal, but the fees were making it hard.

To give you a perspective, the price at launch on Gox was around $0.06 and the whole exchange held less than 1% of the supply. This means that even if you were to use the largest exchange on the market in Q3 2010, you'd have a hard time buying $1k worth of BTC.

One more thing to add. I found daily volume on Gox in August 2010 mentioned in a post and it was 23k BTC, which at that price was around 1400 USD.

[robertcarlyle]

So how soon was the earliest that someone could buy 1000 usd worth of bitcoin when it was really cheap unlike today?  2009, 2010, 2011, maybe 2012?

[coolcoinz]

In multiple transactions? I think that you'd be able to do it in Q2 2010 if you tried in different places all at once, like buying on Bitcoinmarket and Gox at the same time, over the course of a few days. Note that it would significantly pump the price because people were not buying that much at the time.

In a single transaction? Maybe Q4 2010? Between Q3 and Q4 bitcoin rose from 0.06 USD to 0.25, so 4x, which means USD volume of trades also went up. At 0.25 USD per coin, previously mentioned Mt. Gox volume of 1400 USD becomes 5700, and that is if the number of coins changing hands stays the same, but it also went up.

[robertcarlyle]

But even if it were done this way like how much today?

[DannyHamilton]

So how soon was the earliest that someone could buy 1000 usd worth of bitcoin when it was really cheap unlike today?  2009, 2010, 2011, maybe 2012?

Definitely by 2012. I personally knew people buying (and selling) $1000 worth in 2012 when the price per bitcoin was between $8 and $12. That's an average of 100 BTC for $1000 which was easily doable in places like BitFloor and MtGox.

I wasn't aware of Bitcoin yet in 2011, but I suspect that it became quite a bit easier to acquire $1000 worth as the liquidity grew at MtGox throughout that year. If I recall correctly, Bitcoin hit a value of $1 for the first time in February of 2011?  That would mean you could pick up 1000 BTC for $1000 if you could find a seller.

Perhaps someone that was paying closer attention towards the end of 2010 or the beginning of 2012 could give a more exact answer, but I strongly suspect that it became relatively easy to acquire $1000 worth of bitcoin sometime between fourth quarter of 2011 (beginning of October) and third quarter of 2012 (end of June).

[God Of Thunder]

True, mining was possible back then but considering the price at the time, it's also easier to just buy Bitcoin, and in 2010 Bitcoin was worth less than a dollar, it was basically worthless. If we had seen it coming, maybe dropping $1,000 on Bitcoin back then wouldn’t have been a big deal. And if we had held onto it until now we’d be living the kind of life most people can only dream of.

I know Bitcoin was below a dollar and it was easy to buy thousands of Bitcoins at that time. But there were not too many exchanges at that time. The main thing is, people did not know Bitcoin would grow that much in the future. So risking a thousand dollars on something that has no future does not make sense to a lot of people. Compared to buying Bitcoin, mining was much easier and I believe a lot of people mined Bitcoin back then. But a lot of them did not save their seed phrases carefully which is why they lost their Bitcoin.