Famously, the first use of bitcoin to buy a real world product was someone spending 10,000 BTC on $30 of pizza. At its current exchange rate of $30K per coin, that’s 300 million dollars today — or ten million pizzas. Wow.
Despite these numbers, the story is actually pretty boring. So let’s use our freshly-renewed artistic license.
You call the pizza joint, order delivery, and explain. “Look, I’ve been working on this digital currency, can I pay in that?”
“Digital currency? Sorry we don’t take PayPal or whatever,” says the pizza agent — this is the only force standing between you and your sweet, sweet pineapple pizza.
“No, it’s —” There’s a shout on the other side of the line, and some chatter you can’t make out.
“Uh, it turns out my new driver wants to pay and take your digital whatever. Bit of an odd one… She just started today. Anyway, you’ll have your food in thirty minutes or less! Have a nice day.”
Excellent, this is practically like getting free pizza! While you wait, you track down an old hard drive, set it up with a wallet, and transfer in a few thousand — better make it a round ten thousand — coins. You’ve been producing them at a positively prodigious pace since you figured out GPU mining, so why not be generous?
Ding-dong! Are they here already? It’s only been ten minutes; the place must be closer than you thought…
You open the door. “Hi, so uh, like I said on the phone —”
“No problem! I’ll take it!” says the driver eagerly, handing over your pizzas.
You set them down on a nearby table and grab the hard drive. The girl nearly rips it out of your hands, and she’s out the door onto the sidewalk before you can blink.
“Wait! It’s not even really worth anything,” you shout after her.
She turns to you and shouts back, “Not yet!” then gets into her car.
You shrug, chuckle, and close the door on that weirdo. Even if she was only in it for the old hard drive, that’s a deal you’d take any day. Now to relax with some nice pizza!
It’s only as you’re pulling a drink from the fridge that you wonder about something you noticed earlier…
Was that pizza delivery girl driving a DeLorean?
And your fridge logic:
Why would a time traveler need to do something so convoluted for money??