The price of a bitcoin is a fickle thing. It rises and falls like the tides…at least, if the sea were controlled not by the steady tug of the moon’s gravity but by the mysterious invisible (or at least translucent) hand of a free market made up largely of tech-savvy investor-nerds and anti-establishment libertarians.
While the decentralized blockchain-based currency started out small more than a decade ago, when its first known transaction was using 10,000 of them to buy a pair of Papa John’s pizzas, it then rose past $1,000 in 2013, fell back below that in 2014, climbed past its old high of $1,242 in early 2017 before shooting up to nearly $20,000 by the end of the year, fell back down below $3,300 roughly 12 months after that, rocketed back up in 2019 and early 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic’s initial market shock brought the value down again, then began a climb back to a new high of $19,850 by the end of November.
Then it took off like a rocket, climbing to $60,000 over the next five months or so, largely on the back of Elon Musk‘s decision to allow Tesla to accept bitcoin as a form of payment. Come May 2021, though, bitcoin dropped like a stone again, falling to around $30,000 as Musk retracted his decision and announced Tesla would sell off its bitcoin holdings around the same time the Chinese government announced it would crack down on cryptocurrencies.
Musk has since retracted his retraction and declared Tesla will take bitcoin again once there’s proof the currency is being ethically mined (in other words, that clean electricity is being used to run the computers doing the energy-intensive work of making new bitcoins), but so far, the price hasn’t rebounded all that much. As of this story’s writing, a bitcoin is worth just a hair under $32,000.
Now, admittedly, if you bought a bunch of bitcoin back when they were a few dollars apiece, that price would still be more than enough to allow you into the ranks of the Lamborghini bitcoin crew. But for the purposes of this story, we’re simply looking at what sort of cool metal you could buy if you had but a single bitcoin to sell. As the price of a bitcoin changes, we’ll update this story accordingly — but for now, here in the summer of 2021, here’s what sorts of cars you could buy for roughly the $32,000 a bitcoin is worth.
