Written by Milo Vance, mythology deflator at Bitcoin Institute.
Every asset class gets an origin myth with some grandeur to it. Gold has "treasured since antiquity," which is really just a shrug in a toga. The dollar has the full faith and credit of a state with an army. Bitcoin has October 5, 2009, and a guy doing long division against his own power bill.
His name — the only name he ever gave anyone — was NewLibertyStandard. That day, he published the first exchange rate Bitcoin ever had:
$1 = 1,309.03 BTC
Worked the other way, that's $0.000764 per coin. Not "about a tenth of a cent." Not "call it basically free." Six digits deep, with the first meaningful one landing past the fourth decimal place. This is the level of precision you bring to pricing a bond, and he brought it to a currency that, at the moment he published the number, had never once been traded for a dollar.
