Reading 3 min Views 6 Published Updated
Cryptocurrency Twitter was briefly set on fire on May 14 with speculation that the world’s first real purchase made by Bitcoin could have been for JPEGs, not pizza.
In a tweet from independent developer Udi Wertheimer, the Bitcoin advocate shared a screenshot showing that this could be the first purchase using Bitcoin — even before the infamous Bitcoin pizza.
This Twitter Space was FIRE
We discovered that:
the first purchase EVER with bitcoin was buying a JPEG for 500 BTC in Feb 2010
it pre-dates the famous 10,000 BTC pizza
satoshi himself helped facilitate the jpeg sale
laser-eye cult in absolute SHAMBLES pic.twitter.com/b6ESOkbf0i
— Udi Wertheimer ♂️ (@udiWertheimer) May 14, 2023
The published screenshot is dated January 24, 2010, a full four months before Bitcoin Pizza Day, when Bitcoin developer Laszlo Hanets paid 10,000 Bitcoins for two pizzas, believed to be the first real purchase made with Bitcoin.
The screenshot shows a user named Sabunir trying to sell an image for 500 Bitcoin, which at the time was worth about $1, on the Bitcointalk forum.
It even highlighted that the Bitcoin founder under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto was trying to get involved in facilitating the sale.
However, this claim has been questioned: professional poker player-turned-crypto investor Mike McDonald tweeted a screenshot that suggests the Bitcoin transaction could have been a donation, meaning the JPEG was never “sold.”
I’m not sure if it has been dispelled yet but it seems like Sabunir’s 500 btc was a donation rather than sale.
He posted his address for his NFT Jan 24, then posted it again in the btc logo thread on Feb 24. Feb 24 500 btc was sent, Feb 25 he thanks 2 people for donations 1/2 pic.twitter.com/6Rk9Ont9KU
— Mike McDonald (@MikeMcDonald89) May 14, 2023
In a subsequent tweet, Wertheimer acknowledged that his original tweet may have been inaccurate, that while Sabunir did put a JPEG up for sale at 500 BTC and that they received the same amount in their address a month later, “it’s possible that the 500BTC were sent as a donation for another interaction” and that the JPEG sale never actually took place.
According to Wertheimer, without Sabunir’s personal confirmation, it remains unclear why the 500 BTC was transferred.
Related: Bitcoin serial numbers hit Binance NFT Marketplace in latest update
The rumor came about in connection with the Bitcoin ordinals phenomenon, which at the time of publication has seen over 6.1 million images, videos, and even tokens – according to the BRC-20 token standard – minted on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Wertheimer has been a major proponent of Bitcoin NFT ever since Casey Rodamor created the Ordinals protocol on January 21 this year, allowing users to “fit” new pieces of data into the Bitcoin chain.
Since then, Wertheimer has been working to attract a new wave of NFT enthusiasts to Bitcoin through the Ordinals project called Taproot Wizards, which takes its name from the Taproot soft fork that created the Ordinals protocol in the first place.