Top five purchases using bitcoin
After the emergence of cryptocurrencies not many crypto-enthusiasts took an opportunity to exchange one cryptocurrency for another or to pay for goods and services. Deals were rare, some of them were bizarre, as we can see now, and many were preserved exclusively as a crypto community folklore at bitcointalks.org. Worldcore, a European fintech company, has prepared an overview of the five largest asset purchasing transactions done with the use of bitcoin.
#5 spot among the top-ranking bitcoin-transactions belongs to Olivier Janssens for booking a private jet flight from Brussels to Nice in 2013. The multimillionaire booked a flight with a British company PrivateFly.com. The transaction details were not disclosed by the parties, however, according to CoinDesk, this flight could cost 10 to 55 BTC at that time depending on the size of the aircraft.
#4 place is taken by the purchase of a Porsche Cayman by an anonymous buyer that paid 300 BTC to acquire this amazing car from a family from Texas. The buyer, as it is known, was “a young entrepreneur engaged in a diverse range of activities: from construction to production and sale of food and beverages.”
#3 place is occupied by a Dutch IT expert, miner since 2012, and father of 3 children for selling his own home with all his assets for 85 BTC to Didi Taihutt. Since then the family has been living in camping sites, while the crypto-evangelist Didi became a media person and an ICO consultant simply out of his desperate love for adventure. Together with his wife he raises his children, invests 20% of his income in cryptocurrencies, and plans to hold bitcoin till 2020.
#2 spot is reserved for Mikhail Komaransky and the sale of his 9 000 sq. ft. real estate in Coral Gables, Miami in February of 2018 for 455 BTC (about $ 6 million at that time). An interesting fact — the deal was made at the end of January 2018 at an exchange rate about $ 10 000 for 1 BTC; in just a week the BTC/USD exchange rate fell by more than 35% to $ 6,2 000 for 1 BTC.
According to crypto specialists, the analysis carried out by his specialists included numerous real estate transactions. However, as a rule, the parties to these transactions disclose neither the price of the property nor their identity. So, the next largest transaction included in the TOP-rating is a transaction with a known price and at least one identifiable party.
The first place was, is and will be occupied for many years by the legendary purchase of two pizzas for 10 000 BTC in May of 2010 by a software developer Laszlo Hanyets. At that time bitcoin was not yet a global asset and it was impossible to determine its real value. The only thing known that according to various estimates the value of bitcoin was anywhere from 0.8 to 0.3 US cents. It all started on May 18 when Laszlo wrote at bitcointalk.org that he was ready to exchange 10 thousand bitcoins for two pizzas delivered to his place. Four days later, a person under a nickname jercos used his credit card to pay for two Papa John’s pizzas being delivered to Laszlo. Since then, May 22 is celebrated by all crypto-evangelists as the Bitcoin-Pizza Day. The current price of these pizzas is recorded online in a special chart, while Laszlo Hanyec forever became “the guy who bought two pizzas for 10 000 BTC.”
Summing up this list of purchases, I should note that if these sale transactions were placed on a time scale and compared to the bitcoin growth, it would become obvious that the interest in such purchases was dependent on local maximums of the price of the cryptocurrency. The sellers are primarily interested in the price of the asset, therefore, strictly speaking, these are not sales, but rather direct exchange transactions. In order for bitcoin to become a fully accepted monetary unit, two things are still required: capitalization, which low level makes it susceptible to a high volatility, and a convenient mechanism to exchanging it for goods and services. For example, it could be a mechanism similar to the widely used and accepted bank card mechanism.
