On July 18, 2010, Mt. Gox was launched by Jed McCaleb, after reading about bitcoin on Slashdot. Realizing that the bitcoin community needed an exchange for trading bitcoin & fiat currencies, he launched the Mt. Gox exchange & price quoting service, deploying it on a domain he already owned and previously attempted to use to build an online service for “Magic: The Gathering” online game cards, calling his website, Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange (using the initials, “Mt.Gox”)

On July 18, Mt. Gox executed its first Bitcoin trade with a 20 BTC order between two parties. The total value of the transaction was only $0.99. Establishing Bitcoin’s trading price at $0.04951.

BTC Price: $0.04951

This was the first time Bitcoin surpassed 1 penny in valuation.

Art details: Original digital hand painted motion art portrait (NOT Computer Generated.) The ticker tape displays the historical daily price indexes recorded on this day.

Dimensions: 720 x 1080, 19.9 MB, Duration: 15 seconds

Created with Corel Painter, Adobe After Effects & Adobe Premiere

Artist: Denise Holt