Satoshi Nakamoto appears to have aided a pseudonymous user with ways to sell a JPEG for 500 BTC in 2010.

On May 14, the team behind Bitcoin Ordinals project Taproot Wizards sparked a flurry of excitement on Crypto Twitter after announcing a discovery made on the original Bitcoin forum – one that would have changed the history of Bitcoin as we know it.

Udi Wertheimer tweeted that he had found conclusive evidence that the first ever real-world Bitcoin payment was made in 2010 to purchase an NFT.

This Twitter Space was FIRE

We discovered that:

🔥 the first purchase EVER with bitcoin was buying a JPEG for 500 BTC in Feb 2010

🔥 it pre-dates the the famous 10,000 BTC pizza

🔥 satoshi himself helped facilitate the JPEG sale

🔥 laser-eye cult in absolute SHAMBLES pic.twitter.com/b6ESOkbf0i

— Udi Wertheimer 🧙‍♂️ (@udiWertheimer) May 14, 2023

In a post on the Bitcointalk forum dated Jan. 24, 2010, a pseudonymous user “Sabunir” announced his plans to sell a JPEG image for $1 worth of Bitcoin, which at the time amounted to 500 BTC. Sabunir’s post is a good four months before May 22, when Bitcoin developer ​​Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas. 

To make things even more interesting, Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto replied to the user’s post with recommended ways to make a BTC payment for an order. One of Satoshi’s recommendations was for a customer to send BTC to a merchant’s static IP address with a comment. Another way was for the merchant to create a new BTC address to which the customer sends funds to.

“This will be the standard way for website software to do it,” stated Satoshi on the forum. 

However, the claim was soon dispelled by Mike McDonald who suggested that payments sent to Sabunir’s Bitcoin address were actually donations and not a sale.

I’m not sure if it has been dispelled yet but it seems like Sabunir’s 500 btc was a donation rather than sale.

He posted his address for his NFT Jan 24, then posted it again in the btc logo thread on Feb 24. Feb 24 500 btc was sent, Feb 25 he thanks 2 people for donations 1/2 pic.twitter.com/6Rk9Ont9KU

— Mike McDonald (@MikeMcDonald89) May 14, 2023

Shortly after, Wertheimer conceded that his original tweet might be inaccurate, and that the 500 BTC was sent as a donation for a different interaction, while the original JPEG might never have been sold. 

“Only one way to know for sure… maybe one day sabunir comes back and tells us what really happened!” tweeted Wertheimer.

Whether or not the sale was actually executed, some market participants believe that Satoshi’s support in executing the transaction was indicative of him being “pro-NFTs.” The same can be said of early Bitcoin developer Hal Finney, known for receiving the first BTC transaction from Satoshi, who penned an email on Jan. 17, 1993 with the subject “Crypto  trading cards.”

Agree on Satoshi being pro NFTs (why not?) and Hal was also into them. Last time i showed this to a maxi, i never got a response back. pic.twitter.com/RmfFBKjd9j

— Bullish Byte | NextGen Finance (@bullishbyte) May 14, 2023

“the most notable thing of all is that Satoshi treated this all like it was the most normal thing in the world. He’d have absolutely been pro ordinals,” noted McDonald.

“Also it’s reasonably likely either the 100btc or 500 btc donation was from Satoshi himself! Only 3 or 4 people who would have logically made the donations given timing in the thread etc,” he added.