A pizza for 10,000 Bitcoin (BTC), three Bitcoins for a MacDonald’s meal, these are stories that many people are familiar with. Although they are good examples of the coin’s practical uses, the faces behind the stories often regret their actions. The same thing happened to Kashmir Hill, a tech reporter at The New York Times.
Woman decides to live off Bitcoin for a week
Kashmir Hill is a senior tech reporter in The New York Times editorial board. Because of her interest in technology, she was one of the first adopters of Bitcoin. At the time, she was still an editor at Forbes, specializing in technology and privacy. Bitcoin caught their attention at the time due to the anonymity of the payment system.
So she bought a number of Bitcoins at the then small Coinbase at a price of $136 each. She decided to pay only with Bitcoin for a week as an experiment to see how applicable it was. At the time, there were few options for paying with Bitcoin, but because she lived in “Silicon Valley” (San Francisco), she still made ends meet.
At the end of the week, as a successful conclusion, she decided to spend her remaining Bitcoins on a large amount of sushi. She invited a few Bitcoin fanatics on Reddit to dinner at the “Sake Zone,” where she paid for the $1,000 bill with 10.3 Bitcoin. At this point, she still felt guilty because she had paid the owner online with money that she felt had no real value.
Restaurant owner cheated? On the other hand!
A few years later, in 2020, she published a news article about her story. Bitcoin rose to well over $10,000, making it worth hundreds of times what it was when she bought the tokens. While many Bitcoin enthusiasts watched the Bitcoin price with joy, their regret grew even more.
The feeling of having betrayed the owner of the sushi restaurant disappeared like snow in the sun. Her account, to which she included a generous tip, had grown to $200,000 within a few years. She had spent all of her remaining Bitcoins on this meal with people she didn’t even know by name.
She later contacted the restaurant owner Yung Chen. Or actually, ex-restaurant owner, since Chen had taken early retirement. At that time, he made the wise decision not to sell the Bitcoin and instead keep it. He had made several hundred thousand dollars, all from her Bitcoin.
Now he was working as a road inspector, a position he had held for decades. He enjoyed it, he said, and had no ambition to stop. His wife was already completely retired. And the half million he had in his bank account was of course a nice bonus.