From its humble beginnings trading for pennies to becoming legal tender in sovereign nations, from pizza purchases that made history to lost fortunes buried in landfills, Bitcoin has already had a journey that rivals the best Hollywood scripts.
Here are some fun facts about everyone’s favorite magical internet money.
Bitcoin factoids
Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s creator, owns around 1 million bitcoins (worth billions of dollars) but has never moved or spent them.1 The FBI became the holder of (at the time) the largest Bitcoin wallet in the world after seizing 144,000 bitcoins from the Silk Road marketplace in 2013.2 However, Satoshi Nakamoto is the largest Bitcoin holder.
There’s a limited number of bitcoins that will ever exist — 21 million. However, due to lost wallets and passwords, the actual number of usable bitcoins is significantly lower. Some estimates suggest up to 20% of all bitcoins are permanently lost.
For example, James Howells accidentally threw away a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins in 2013.3 He repeatedly tried to get permission to excavate the Welsh landfill where it’s buried, even offering the local council a percentage of the recovered funds.
(Following a hearing, a High Court dismissed Howells’ claim for excavation in January 2025, ruling that it had no prospect of success.)
A few people have had QR codes of their Bitcoin wallet addresses tattooed on their bodies, allowing for quick transactions by scanning their skin.4
Bitcoin firsts, a timeline
The first Bitcoin whitepaper was published by Satoshi Nakamoto on October 31, 2008, titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” which describes the original plan and protocol for Bitcoin.
The first Bitcoin block (the Genesis block) was mined on January 3, 2009.
The first Bitcoin transaction occurred on January 12, 2009, when Satoshi Nakamoto sent 10 BTC to Hal Finney.
The first Bitcoin exchange, Bitcoin Market, was established in February 2010.
The first real-world Bitcoin transaction was on May 22, 2010 (also known as Bitcoin Pizza Day), when Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two Papa John’s pizzas (roughly $41 at the time, or $0.0041 per Bitcoin). The Bitcoin Pizza Index tracks how much that purchase would be worth in today’s Bitcoin: https://bitcoinpizzaindex.net/.
The first major company to accept Bitcoin payments was WordPress in November 2012.
The first Bitcoin ATM was installed at Waves Coffee Shop in Vancouver, Canada, on October 29, 2013. The first Bitcoin ATM in Europe was installed in Bratislava, Slovakia in December 2013. The first Bitcoin ATM installed in the United States went online on February 18, 2014, in a cigar bar in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but was removed 30 days later.
The first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender was El Salvador on September 7, 2021.
