Bitcoin Pizza Day rewind: A homage to weird and wonderful BTC purchases

cointelegraph.com:

Happy Bitcoin Pizza Day! Before you dial for a Margherita to commemorate the world’s first real-world Bitcoin transaction, here’s a slice of trivia:

What do a family holiday to Japan, a 50 Cent album, a steak dinner, and a framed cat photo all have in common? 

They were all paid for with Bitcoin (BTC) by members of the Cointelegraph Bitcoin community! And just like the Bitcoin pizzas that cost 10,000 BTC, which are now worth more than $300 million, the community’s Bitcoin purchases have also skyrocketed. 

Benjamin de Waal, the VP of Engineering at Bitcoin exchange Swan Bitcoin told Cointelegraph, “I spent 7 BTC on a family trip to Japan a few years back.” In today’s value, 7 BTC is worth well over $200,000 —  but Ben’s happy because his kids are happy:

Felix Crisan, the scammer vigilante, told Cointelegraph how he once spent 50 BTC (worth $1.5 million) developing a new software module for his company in 2015. Crisan added that in 2016:

That’s a $30,000 bet at BTC's current market price.

Jeffrey Albus, Editor at Cointelegraph, shared that he splashed out on a steak dinner to demonstrate Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer capabilities "sometime in 2011 or early 2012." 

Worse still, the value of 15 BTC back over ten years ago was so small that it fell short of the total bill: Albus had to top it up with good old greenbacks. The value of the Bitcoiner-appropriate steak dinner is now worth shy of half a million dollars.

In a word to the wise, Julien Liniger, CEO of Swiss Bitcoin exchange Relai–and a Bitcoin maximalist through and through, told Cointelegraph that he “bought a bitcoin hoodie for 0.1 BTC back in the days, but that was the last thing” — a roughly $3,000 hoodie. He explained that “it then became too stupid of a thing to me to spend