17 years Ago, Martti Malmi Sold 5,050 Bitcoin

[TundraPilot]

The settlement process interests me as much as the amount. Who sent their side first, and how did they establish enough trust to complete the exchange? Details like those would make this a more useful piece of Bitcoin history than simply calculating what the coins would be worth today.

[d5000]

There is a difference between a direct purchase and a barter for goods.

I don't know why you and BlackHatCoiner mentioned that complicated examples. Jeremy was simply the payment processor. In today's supermarkets, most people pay with cards, and thus they pay to the payment processor (e.g. Visa). This is because the supermarkets don't have infrastructure to handle the card payment, they need an intermediary.

Jeremy did the same with Bitcoin: the pizza sellers didn't have the infrastructure to handle Bitcoin, so Jeremy stepped in and did that intermediary step.

The only thing which is different is the exchange rate conversion (1 "VisaUSD" is the same as 1 "BankUSD" and 1 "CentralBankUSD", while 1 BTC fluctuates to the USD), but here BHC brought up the example of an USD to EUR on-the-fly exchange on Amazon and that's quite much the same thing, only that Bitcoin isn't "legal tender" in the US (and was much less so in 2010).

in the pizza purchase, nothing would have worked without fiat! Nothing!

Yes but that wasn't the point of the question whether Jeremy did sell a "service" to Laszlo and thus Bitcoin was indeed used as money in that particular step of the trade. The whole point is that Jeremy accepted BTC.

This famous Alpaca Socks farm [1] was perhaps the first time (apart from that JPEG seller mentioned before, which is a bit dubious) where such an intermediary wasn't necessary because the Grass Hill Alpaca farm did accept BTC directly. There were some other services mentioned in that particular Slashdot post from February 2011:

- web hosting on vekja.net
- bitcoingadgets.com
- beauty products on myhealthyorganics.com

Grass Hill Alpacas seems to be the only domain still active. Of course, this was more than half a year later than Laszlo, although I don't know when these services started to accept BTC.


[1] https://grasshillalpacas.com/our-bitcoin-story/
[2] https://slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/189246/Online-Only-Currency-BitCoin-Reaches-Dollar-Parity

it's a detective work thing that will not lead to anything major.
But what's the point?

Journalists love such stuff to sell their articles. It would be a cool story - "a JPEG with [insert subject of the pic here] is actually the real Bitcoin Pizza" or so. We could even have a new Bitcoin mascot if the subject is nice. So I'm a bit surprised nobody did that in over 15 years. Perhaps that actually hints that the JPEG was never really sold. (@rodarmor, don't you want to play detective pay some poor third world guy with your Ordinals millions to find that out, so you then can inscribe it as an Ordinal?)

[Nothingtodo]

At the beginning of the discovery of Bitcoin, people did not give much importance to Bitcoin and if they had understood then that Bitcoin would be like this in the future, then someone would have sold Bitcoin like this. They did not give importance to Bitcoin then and if they had, no one would have bought just two slices of pizza with 10000 Bitcoin. No one would have sold 5000 Bitcoin for just a few dollars. But with the evolution of time, Bitcoin has now become so valuable that now all the investors who sold Bitcoin without giving importance to such Bitcoin in the past are regretting it at this moment, holding onto the memories of the past.

[tread93]

Bitcoin history is not yet complete if we do not mention the name Sirius and his past eminent presence, influence, and contribution to the Bitcoin community, which we have today as bitcointalk; therefore, I don't know if this topic will be best on this board or meta,

I think it is better here, as it goes about a Bitcoin transaction.

There is also one unique feature to talk about Martti Malmi, AKA Sirius; aside being a developer, he was also the first person to engage on a Fiat Bitcoin trade, which on an occasion like this we stand to learn from this landmark achievement he has made that pave way to what many of us today now see as crypto trade, whereby we can use our Fiat to acquire Bitcoin and can also trade our bitcoin for Fiat.

While the value of what he sold, 5,050 Bitcoin, was $5 back then, you can imagine holding the same value of 5,050 BTC today.  
https://x.com/i/status/2109679802235904388

That's interesting, because I knew about the first transaction involving a good—the famous pizza—but I didn't know about this first transaction. And I've been in this field for a few years now. Yeah 5,050 Bitcoin is a lot today but the importance of that transaction is that it paved way.

Yeah this is also the first time I am hearing about this, it’s just as important as the 10k pizza transaction ands still a boat loads of bitcoin today. I wonder if the guy ever spent the $5 to get those coins back or if he ever thought about that, probably not but would be great for him though lol

[Arenga pinnata]

Bitcoin history is not yet complete if we do not mention the name Sirius and his past eminent presence, influence, and contribution to the Bitcoin community, which we have today as bitcointalk; therefore, I don't know if this topic will be best on this board or meta,

There is also one unique feature to talk about Martti Malmi, AKA Sirius; aside being a developer, he was also the first person to engage on a Fiat Bitcoin trade, which on an occasion like this we stand to learn from this landmark achievement he has made that pave way to what many of us today now see as crypto trade, whereby we can use our Fiat to acquire Bitcoin and can also trade our bitcoin for Fiat.

While the value of what he sold, 5,050 Bitcoin, was $5 back then, you can imagine holding the same value of 5,050 BTC today.  
https://x.com/i/status/2109679802235904388

It turns out there are many other stories besides the pizza purchase, and this is one of them.

But my focus is really on the amount of Bitcoin spent, like the one for the pizza and this one: 5,050 BTC, which would currently be worth about $414,486,274.50.  Ah, if I had been this person back then, I’d be having a hard time sleeping right now just thinking about the amount I spent back then.

However, if someone was able to spend thousands of BTC back then, I think it stands to reason that they must have had even more than that, right?