„Twelve years ago, a baby was born after someone used bitcoin to pay for a frozen egg IVF,“ writes longtime Slashdot reader bobdevine. „I, for one, welcome…“
Blockworks tells the story of how it all came to be: In February 2012 — almost two years after Laszlo’s pizzas — a fertility doctor named C. Terence Lee set about a personal and professional quest to onboard his patients to Bitcoin by accepting BTC for his services. He started with a „Bitcoin accepted here“ sign in his window, and then a Reddit post.
„Jumping in to do my part to support the BTC economy. This may be a historic first?“ Lee wrote in a post on the BitMarket subreddit, titled: „[WTS][USA] Male Fertility Evaluation.“ Lee was offering a 15-minute consultation to discuss fertility questions and a sperm analysis in exchange for 15 BTC, valued at $70 or so at the time. „Actual value over $100,“ he wrote. Within three months, he’d found a Bitcoin customer.
„The patient turned out not… so much having a burning desire to know about his fertility, but he was a Bitcoin enthusiast, and he liked the idea of participating in history, in this ritual ceremony of what could be perhaps the world’s first Bitcoin medical transaction,“ Lee explained at a 2013 conference in San Jose. „So we chatted about Bitcoin. He taught me a lot about mining. That’s how he acquired bitcoin. And we did a sperm test, and it turned out he had really good sperm … after it was done he sent me 15 bitcoins… „
Lee changed up his strategy to only quiz his most trusted patients. There was one couple, who, on their fourth attempt at IVF, agreed to pay in bitcoin for a 50% discount, with Lee walking them through exchanging U.S. dollars for bitcoin via CryptoXChange, a now-defunct exchange operating out of Australia. The sperm stuck, leading CNN to reveal, on this day in 2013, „the world’s first Bitcoin baby“ — a baby bought entirely with bitcoin. Thirty bitcoin to be exact, an amount then worth $500, or $3 million today.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.