🤩 $1 legend

The world often feels very big. Billions of humans scattered across hundreds of countries, speaking thousands of languages and eating even more types of food.

But no matter how big it may seem, we can still reach out and touch it. You can just do things. 

Today’s Bitcoin Legend, Plato, understood that much earlier than almost anyone else in Bitcoin, when 14 years ago he set off on a road trip across North America with a pioneering plan: 

Make it from the East Coast to the West Coast without spending any dollars. Only bitcoin.

Bitcoin Legend — The Real Plato

Plato was an early adopter in almost every sense, having first discovered Bitcoin in 2010 and even mined coins when they were worth less than $1.

Inspired by its potential to change the world, Plato was pulled to spread the word. After losing his electrical engineering job in January 2011, by April he’d set off as a Bitcoin pioneer across a land largely unfamiliar with magic internet money.

“I want adventure, and the only other real component is the altruism. I want to help Bitcoin,” Plato said on a podcast one week into his 3,000-mile journey. 

The goal: prove bitcoin could work in everyday life, even if few people in the real world knew what it was at the time. He was the first known human to attempt travelling across the United States living solely on bitcoin — using it to pay for food, gas and lodging.

Bitcoin had the power to reshape our lives in incredible ways, Plato believed, but it would first need to “hit some critical mass” of adoption. He only hoped to “accelerate the process a little bit.”

Friendly strangers from across the US could pin an interactive map with their locations, so that Plato could drop by to barter bitcoin for supplies or shelter.

Mostly, surviving on Bitcoin alone in 2011 meant Plato had to regularly convince others to buy stuff for him with their own dollars, before paying them back in BTC.

A video from the trip shows Plato trading bitcoin for gasoline outside a 7/11 in Salt Lake City. The pair stepped through sending BTC to each other using keys generated by MyBitcoin, an early hosted wallet service that shut down due to a debilitating hack only months later.

Meanwhile, bitcoin was experiencing one of its first parabolic price rallies, going from $1 in March to $2 as Plato reached Alabama only two weeks into his trip, having driven 55 miles per hour the entire way to save gas. 

There, he gave one of the first college lectures on Bitcoin, a technical breakdown of mining difficulty and transactions in a UXTO system. Bitcoin had climbed to $8 by the time Plato arrived in Denver toward the end of May, where Plato went skydiving and attended concerts. 

At one point, having camped out in the woods for days, a friend offered Plato a place to stay, where the kitchen had been converted into an ad-hoc home mining setup. 

One of those rigs successfully found a block — netting the 50 BTC reward — which was donated to fund Plato’s trip. What was $500 back then would be more than $4 million today.

Bitcoin broke past $14 when Plato arrived in Las Vegas. It quickly doubled again to $30 for the first time ever in June, and Plato made it to the West Coast shortly after and posted up in Portland.

On July 1, three months after he started the first ever Bitcoin road trip, Plato shared an update on Tumblr:

“Well, in a nutshell, I made it! CT to LA without spending a single dollar. Since then I’ve been exploring San Francisco and Portland. Somehow I’ve met fewer Bitcoiners in either of these cities than anywhere else, so I’ve been mostly sleeping in my car.”

“Portland is really sweet. It feels like a big city in a small town, in a big city… which sounds stupid but w/e. There’s cool people everywhere, and more culture than a tub of yogurt an art museum.”

Plato introduced hundreds of people to Bitcoin on his journey and continued to use bitcoin wherever he could. 

More critically, he proved that Bitcoin could reimagine money by going all-in himself, at a time when Bitcoin was, at best, an esoteric quirk to most people.

For that, Plato will forever be a Bitcoin Legend.

— David

Plato’s 2011 road trip truly came at a cultural inflection point for Bitcoin. 

Six months after he made it to the West Coast, The Good Wife aired its infamous “Bitcoin For Dummies” episode, the first-ever Bitcoin reference in television history.

In the episode, star lawyer Alicia Florrick defends another lawyer, representing Bitcoin’s creator, “Mr. Bitcoin,” who’s facing pressure from the Department of Justice to reveal their identity.

In the end, “Mr. Bitcoin” turned out to be three people at once, and to get away with it, they’d intentionally snitched on each other with phoney evidence — confusing the Feds into bungling their investigation.

You never know, the truth might not be stranger than fiction after all.

• Marathon has fully powered 25MW worth of bitcoin miners which are fueled entirely by flared natural gas across Texas and North Dakota. Talk about spicy meatballs!

• Bitcoin strategic reserve bills have advanced in both New Hampshire and Florida, with the former now headed to the Senate and the latter onto more votes.

• Trump signed the first-ever crypto bill into law, repealing a Biden-era rule that demanded DeFi apps report user information to the IRS in the same way as brokers.