- On October 5, 2009, the New Liberty Standard website published the first known bitcoin price. For a dollar, it yielded 1,309.03 bitcoin, or $0.00076 per coin.
- The price came from the cost of electricity. The author of the website calculated how much energy a computer mining bitcoins uses and how much this energy costs.
- The dollar then cost PLN 2.8851. One hundred dollars, or PLN 288.51, corresponded to 130,903 bitcoins at this rate.
- There was nowhere to buy them. Martti Malmi made his first transaction a week later, via a private transfer via PayPal.
The multiplier is simple arithmetic from two prices. Nobody took the one from 2009 from the market because there was no market yet.
The first price of bitcoin came from the cost of electricity
The price was calculated by the author of the website based on the cost of energy. He assumed the annual consumption of a computer operating at full capacity at 1,331.5 kilowatt hours. He calculated the price of electricity for American farms at $0.1136 per kilowatt hour. This resulted in his monthly bill. He divided it by the number of bitcoins his computer had mined in the last thirty days.
Readers’ opinion
Will Bitcoin hit $100,000 before the end of 2026?
At that time, energy was the only quantity in this system that anyone could measure. There was nowhere to buy bitcoin. Neither can I sell it. It was possible to dig at home, and the digging has an invoice that comes on paper.
Who the author was is still unknown. The website was run anonymously.
The first merchant paid $5 for 5,050 bitcoins
The rate became real a week after publication. On October 12, 2009, Finnish programmer Martti Malmi sold 5,050 bitcoins to the website and received $5.02 for them. The money came via PayPal transfer. Malmi confirmed this transaction publicly many years later.
The same 5,050 bitcoins are worth PLN 1.7 billion today.
What couldn’t be done for PLN 288
But no one in Poland could buy them at that time. There were no stock exchanges and no currency exchange offices. The only way was through a private transfer to the anonymous author of the website. He was just starting to take orders.
What does this mean for you?
Such calculations show the past and tell you nothing about the future. Bitcoin can lose all its value and there is no rule against this. The bill does not include any stock exchange commission or profit tax, which you settle on your own in Poland.
No one issues such an invoice today, because the price is determined by the market.
That bill included the electricity used by one computer in a month. Today, bitcoin costs PLN 336,320.65.
