On October 5, 2009, NewLibertyStandard published the first-ever exchange rate for Bitcoin.
$1 = 1,309.03 BTC ($0.000764 per BTC)
At July 2026 prices of around $64,000 per BTC, the 1,309.03 BTC that one dollar bought would be worth about $84 million.
The methodology: divide $1.00 by the average amount of electricity required to run a computer at high CPU usage for a year (1,331.5 kWh), multiplied by the average residential cost of electricity in the United States for the previous year ($0.1136), divided by 12 months, divided by the number of bitcoins generated over the past 30 days.
In other words, Bitcoin’s first price was a cost-of-production figure — the electricity to mine a coin — not a market price set by buyers and sellers. This was the same pricing principle Satoshi himself had urged six weeks earlier, in feedback on Martti Malmi’s exchange proposal. How the relationship fared once real markets existed — and how the causality reversed, exactly as Satoshi predicted in February 2010 — is traced in the price-vs-production-cost analysis.
Shortly after, on October 12, 2009, Martti Malmi sold 5,050 BTC to NewLibertyStandard for $5.02 via PayPal — the first known exchange of Bitcoin for fiat currency.
At 2025 prices exceeding $100,000 per BTC, those 5,050 bitcoins would be worth over $500 million.