1,309 Bitcoins for One Dollar: How BTC’s First Price Was Calculated 17 Years Ago Using an Electricity Bill
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06.10.2026 21:44
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2 min read
In the fall of 2009, the cryptocurrency industry did not yet exist in its familiar form, and the Bitcoin network had been running for less than nine months. On October 5, 2009, the service New Liberty Standard published one of the first digital currency quotes in history: one US dollar bought 1,309.03 BTC. If someone had held onto that symbolic purchase until October 2026, their dollar balance would now exceed $112 million.
At the time, there were no order books, no market makers and no liquidity. To arrive at even an approximate value for the coin in real money, the creator of New Liberty Standard calculated the rate solely from the cost of the electricity consumed.
The mathematical model took into account the average power consumption of a home PC processor, the cost of a kilowatt-hour in the US and the number of coins that could be mined over the preceding 30 days. By that formula, one BTC was valued at roughly $0.000764. The rate began shifting rapidly from the very first days: a day later, a dollar bought 1,130 BTC, and by mid-October, about 880 BTC.
The first PayPal transaction and the historical context
The mathematical theory quickly turned into practice. According to CoinMarketCap’s timeline, on October 12, 2009, Finnish developer Martti Malmi, one of Satoshi Nakamoto’s first assistants, sent 5,050 BTC to the operator of New Liberty Standard and received $5.02 in return via a direct transfer to a PayPal account. That transaction became the first documented sale of bitcoins for fiat currency — seven months before Laszlo Hanyecz’s famous deal involving two pizzas for 10,000 BTC.
In October 2026, the first cryptocurrency is trading at around $85,700 per coin. The overall gain in the quote since that first calculation has exceeded 11.2 billion percent.
There is no point in harboring illusions about easy wealth in those years: in 2009, buying bitcoins with a couple of taps on a smartphone was impossible. No exchange infrastructure existed, the software was run through a console, and the vast majority of early adopters saw the technology as a local experiment among cypherpunks, never expecting virtual coins to turn into a global financial asset.
