Bitcoin history was uncovered and it was almost an NFT
Sometimes the most noteworthy thing in non-fungible tokens isn’t an NFT. A nugget of blockchain history was unearthed this weekend when internet sleuths uncovered the first documented financial transaction on the world’s first blockchain. In January 2010, a user named Sabunir decided to try Bitcoin, and as a test, sold a digital picture for US$1 in Bitcoin.
Was this the world’s first NFT sale? No, but it is a perfect example of the use case of NFTs; preserving the provenance and ownership history of literally anything digital (not just a jpeg).
This 500 BTC jpeg sale would be worth about US$13.7 million today. Had the image been tokenized as an NFT, it would have gone down as the most significant NFT in history. If the image is recovered in the future, it would hold no value. But if it started as an NFT, the world would know exactly which copy was the original, and one lucky person would have generational wealth from it.
In the past 30 days, Bitcoin Ordinals and BRC-20s have turned the OG blockchain into the blockchain with the second-highest sales volume in the world. Bitcoin NFTs are just getting started and in the long run, I expect Bitcoin to compete head-to-head with Ethereum’s all-time sales. It may actually exceed them too.
