In 2010 the first Bitcoin purchase was made for two pizzas from Papa Johns. By 2011 it was possible to purchase Alpaca socks, and in 2012 VPN access. Today, I just preordered a Tesla Model 3 for 2.413612 Bitcoin.
When I first read about Tesla Motors, it was in regards to the release of the Tesla Roadster in 2007 on Slate. I remember reading the statistics of the vehicle thinking, how is it possible for an electric vehicle to possibly have a 0–60 time that rivals that of the latest model Ferrari. The reality of such acceleration for an electric vehicle seemed illogical at the time, I was left equally skeptical and excited.
This revelation led me to join the electric vehicle engineering club in college, where I led a team to build a battery swapping station for commercial electric vehicles, and coordinated regular tours to Tesla Motors starting in 2010, where we got to ride in a Tesla Roadster.
The ride was better than I had imagined. It was very low to the ground, agile, and one of the fastest vehicles I had ridden in at the time. The acceleration glued me to the seat and propelled me down the highway at an eerily constant torque. I had to have one.
Fast-forward to 2016, still just as big of a fan of new and emerging technologies, I have been entrenched in the world of Bitcoin. Today there are many applications coming online that enable consumers to buy everyday goods for Bitcoin. So I decided to perform the momentous act of preordering my Tesla Model 3 with Bitcoin.
My weapon of choice was Shakepay, a new application which enables you to load up a one-time-use credit card for Bitcoin.
Using my homebrew SMS interface for my BitGo web wallet, I loaded up a card on Shakepay with Bitcoin, and used the card to preorder a Tesla Model 3. The entire process took me 60 seconds once my card was loaded. There was no credit check involved, or a waiting period for the credit card to arrive in the mail — it just worked.
As Steve Coast said, “The world will only get weirder”. How right he was. I just preordered an automobile that I have never seen or touched, which is propelled by electrons flowing through copper wires, that has a 0–60 of under four seconds and supposedly comes with no instrument cluster. I preordered this vehicle with an invisible currency that was invented by a pseudo-anonymous computer programmer who calls himself Satoshi Nakamoto and is likely not Japanese. I made this purchase using a service that dispenses ephemeral credit cards made by some Canadian guy that I met online named Jean. Whom I met after placing a $400 Bitcoin bounty for creating a Bitcoin payable API endpoint that could order and deliver me pizza upon payment. Weird.
