Bitcoin's First Price Was $0.000764 — Set by One Man and His Power Bill
On October 5, 2009, a pseudonymous user called NewLibertyStandard published Bitcoin's first ever exchange rate, valuing one dollar at 1,309.03 BTC, calculated purely from U.S. residential electricity costs and network mining output. A week later, on October 12, early Bitcoin contributor Martti Malmi completed the currency's first documented cash trade, selling 5,050 BTC to NewLibertyStandard for $5.02 via PayPal — a sum that would be worth over half a billion dollars at recent prices. NewLibertyStandard's correspondence with Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto from that same period reveals a far more mundane reality, with messages focused on Linux build errors and a laptop fan spinning at full speed from mining. Despite anchoring the economics of what would become a multi-trillion-dollar asset class, his contributions went largely unrecognised and undocumented at the time. The 1,309.03 BTC that original one dollar purchased would be valued at roughly $84 million today.
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