Bitcoin history post incoming. In 2009, what was perhaps the very first Bitcoin exchange accepted PayPal payments in exchange for BTC. The name of that "exchange" was New Liberty Standard. I use the quotation marks because it was operated by Sirius, Martti Malmi. The way it worked was you would email NLS with a request to buy or sell and the number of coins. The website looked something like this:
How was Bitcoin first valued?
my exchange rate was calculated by dividing $1.00 by the average amount of electricity required to run a computer with high CPU for a year, 1331.5 kWh, multiplied by the the average residential cost of electricity in the United States for the previous year, $0.1136, divided by 12 months divided by the number of bitcoins generated by my computer over the past 30 days.
BTC first traded for $0.0009940594 per coin. New Liberty Standard first sold Bitcoin for US Dollars on October 12, 2009, when 5050 BTC were exchanged for $5.02, the transaction on the blockchain (Block #24,835):
It was a simpler time, before all the major centralized exchanges. But, to put it simply, Bitcoin was first valued based on the cost of the electricity it took to mine the coins. The focus was on decentralization and the other ideals behind Bitcoin: trustlessness (though I suppose you would have had to had some level of trust in New Liberty Standard), individual financial sovereignty, and the libertarian cypherpunk influence.
Anyway, back to Malmi. He was a bitcoin developer from 2009 to 2011, a pioneer in the field. If it weren't for his early work, we may not be where we're at today. I rarely see his name mentioned nowadays, but I think it's important to give him the credit he deserves. A tip of the cap to you, sir. Thank you for the work you have done. I'd be remiss if we didn't circle back to the beginnings, to what Bitcoin originally sought to do...fix the money, fix the world. I'll end with a now five year old post from Malmi himself:
The original Bitcoin faucet is long gone, but there are still ways to collect some free crypto if you invest some of your free time:
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Sign up here on Publish0x, if you haven't already, to earn free crypto for reading & writing content
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Join Cointiply and roll the faucet every hour, view PTC ads, take surveys to earn free Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, or Dash
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Downoad the Bitcoin Cash Giveaway to collect some free BCH sats, paid out weekly
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Check out Yescoiner to easily collect some satoshis; no nonsense -- just solve a captcha. Low payout, slow drip here
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For rewards in XNO, DOGE and BTC, check out TipNano app
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Come to the Crypto Pizza Party on Zora and you can earn $ETH and $ZORA by posting content and trading; every creator gets their own coin and every post is a coin!
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Visit Stacker.news and earn some sats by posting interesting content and commenting what others share
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The most off-the-wall faucet is Crypto Junkie, offering payouts in various cryptos to Final Autoclaim & Faucetpay
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If you're DCA'ing your Bitcoin stack, try River for zero-fee recurring BTC buys & earn 3.5% Bitcoin interest on deposited USD
