Two words that turned $8.99 into a cool million dollars

A yellow legal pad with “Buy Bitcoin” scribbled on it - the type that will cost you $8.99 for a three-pack on Amazon — just sold for $1.027 million during an auction. 

The hastily produced sign was flashed by an intern back in 2017 during televised Congressional testimony of then-Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen. The placard quickly became a rallying cry for a small but fast-growing community of crypto developers and investors, and now a sign of the cryptocurrency’s renaissance. 

Since then, Bitcoin’s price has surged from around $2,300 to a record high of almost $74,000 in March as financial services titans such as Fidelity and BlackRock joined in on championing the digital asset. With retail investors also lured back into crypto after several years of turmoil and volatile price swings, early Bitcoin artifacts like the sign are in vogue again. 

The winning bid was made by an anonymous buyer, who bid 16 Bitcoin for the item, according to Scare City, the auction site where the sale was conducted. In the final minutes of the bidding, an error made it appear that $6.4 million was bid, before it was recognized as a mistake, and the price was brought down. 

The sign was sold by Christian Langalis, who as a 22-year-old intern at the Libertarian think tank Cato Institute quickly wrote out the message after snagging a seat behind Yellen during her appearance before the House Financial Service Committee in July 2017. After the advertisement was caught on TV, Langalis was promptly escorted out.

The auction materials described the item as “Ink Drawing on Legal Pad” weighing half a pound. The legal pad also contains Langalis’s notes from the hearing that day. “The page with the sign drawing was removed from the notepad shortly after the hearing. It has since been reattached with clear archival wire,” the description said.

Langalis plans to use the proceeds to help fund a Bitcoin software project, he said earlier in an interview.

 Copyright Bloomberg News