NewLibertyStandard

On October 5, 2009, a pseudonymous user named NewLibertyStandard published Bitcoin’s first dollar-denominated exchange rate: $1.00 = 1,309.03 BTC — about $0.00076 per coin. The rate came from a cost-of-production formula: average annual electricity cost of a high-CPU computer, divided by 12 months and by the number of bitcoins mined over the preceding 30 days.

A week later, on October 12, 2009, they paid Martti Malmi $5.02 via PayPal for 5,050 BTC — the first known bitcoin-for-fiat transaction.

NewLibertyStandard’s real-world identity has never been publicly revealed. They are BitcoinTalk user #26 (registered January 19, 2010) and were active until December 2012. On February 5, 2010 they proposed adopting the Thai baht symbol (฿) and the three-letter currency code “BTC” — the BTC ticker became the universal standard.

First Bitcoin Exchange Rate

On October 5, 2009, NewLibertyStandard published the first known Bitcoin-to-US-dollar exchange rate: $1.00 = 1,309.03 BTC (approximately $0.00076 per bitcoin). The rate was calculated using a cost-of-production formula based on the electricity required to mine Bitcoin. As documented on the NewLibertyStandard wetpaint Exchange Rate page (later mirrored on wikifoundry), the formula divided the average annual electricity cost of running a computer at high CPU usage by 12 months and by the number of bitcoins mined over the preceding 30 days. This was the first time Bitcoin was assigned a dollar-denominated price. The formula itself was not NewLibertyStandard’s invention: Satoshi had advised Martti Malmi to price his own exchange service the same way six weeks earlier, and the archive’s price-vs-production-cost analysis traces the same cost-anchored principle through Satoshi’s 2010 statement of the equilibrium and the decade of research that followed.

First Bitcoin-to-Fiat Transaction

On October 12, 2009, Finnish developer Martti Malmi sold 5,050 BTC to NewLibertyStandard for $5.02 via PayPal. This is the first known exchange of bitcoin for fiat currency, establishing Bitcoin as an economic good with real-world monetary value.

New Liberty Standard Exchange

NewLibertyStandard operated a website (newlibertystandard.wikifoundry.com) that offered to buy and sell bitcoins for US dollars via PayPal. It was not a traditional exchange with a matching order book; rather, NewLibertyStandard set a fixed price and manually processed trades. It was the earliest known bitcoin trading service.

BTC Ticker Proposal

On February 5, 2010, NewLibertyStandard posted on BitcoinTalk (thread #41) proposing the adoption of the Thai baht symbol (฿) and the three-letter currency code “BTC” for Bitcoin. While the symbol was debated, the BTC ticker code became the universally adopted standard.

Acknowledged by Satoshi

In the Bitcoin 0.2 release announcement (December 2009), Satoshi Nakamoto wrote:

“Many thanks to Martti (sirius-m) for all his development work, and to New Liberty Standard for his help with testing the Linux version.”

This acknowledgment places NewLibertyStandard among the small group of individuals personally recognized by Satoshi for their contributions. That Linux testing grew out of a real bug: weeks earlier, on the bitcoin-list mailing list, NewLibertyStandard had reported Bitcoin crashing under Wine, prompting Satoshi’s diagnosis and a reply from Eugen Leitl asking why Linux still had no native .deb package.