According to Reddit, the first trade was in October 2009, where somebody bought 5050 Bitcoin via PayPal for $5.02:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/16kzhvm/til_the_firstever_bitcointofiat_sale_5050_btc_for/

This means, the first recorded price has been approximately 0.001 USD.  There were already 1.28 million BTC mined at that time, so the initial market cap was around 1300$.

PS: That was more than six months before Laszlo's famous pizza purchase. The pizza purchase would have been for $0.004. This means we had already a small bull market in 2009/10 of 300% price increase

Are you talking about ICOs? This is not the case for ALL newly launched coins.



No, that wasn't the first Bitcoin trade. It was the first documented time Bitcoin was used as a medium of exchange for a real-world physical good. But, as far as I know, New Liberty Standard - the first Bitcoin exchange - was launched back in 2009.


How did you come at that number? 10,000 BTC for two Papa John's pizzas (worth about $40 at the time). Do the math.

The estimated mining  cost was used in setting  the price then
And the first seller was a user here Sirius to New Liberty Standard
 
I will also be sharing this that was stated by DdmrDdmr some years ago

That’s why I usually tell folks that get too excited due to the bull market , that Bitcoin has been bullish all this while from the year 2009 till date . Though during those times there are usually some serious up and down movement , I went through the Reddit post scroll down to the comment section I saw some folks commenting things like “I wish someone can take me back to the year 2009”  to buy bitcoin cheap .

Funny how ten years from now many will still make that same statement, even those that saw bitcoin at the price range of $1000 are still regretting not taken action then , thinking bitcoins was at its peak already then like how many still thinks now . Is never too late to start now , Bitcoin may or may not outperform its past but just know that we are not at the peak yet.

How about you start with zero, just like you mentioned in the post?

If you are looking for any figure above zero, then you are not going to get the exact value or at least an accurate one. Back in the day some people would trade Bitcoin peer-to-peer style. I would just say it doesn't even matter, and I don't even see the point of you trying to compare Bitcoin to launched coins that have devs behind them who are just looking to become millionaires from their coin projects.

Zero.

Your mistake is comparing bitcoin (an actual peer-to-peer digital cash) with altcoins (pump and dumps created for profiting).
The first thing altcoins do is get their coin listed somewhere and attach a price tag to it because the main objective they had for creating that altcoin was for it to be traded for profit making. But that was never bitcoin's objective. Satoshi didn't invent Bitcoin for people to trade it on some exchange or swap it for fiat and make profit from its fluctuations. It was invented to serve as a payment system, so it never needed that "price tag" the way altcoins do.

Besides, there was no exchanges back in 2008-2009 for Satoshi to list bitcoin on and announce its "trading" open. It was an experiment to see if a global digital peer-to-peer money can exist. Slowly as the adoption grew, bitcoin gained a natural value (that continues growing to this day) then it got a price tag.

I can still remember during the height of ICOs, tokens have assumed price value in the tokenomics part of their whitepaper. They had pre-selling prices, public sale prices, and other prices depending on whether you're buying early or late. They had soft caps and maximum caps.

Bitcoin was different because it was designed to be money itself. It wasn't designed to represent a certain fiat equivalent. It wasn't minted to be sold for fiat, to provide funding to a startup, to enrich developers, and so on.

There was 0 value at the start precisely because the market had the absolute freedom to assign value to it, or even whether to accept it or not.

Laszlo's pizza purchase wasn't exactly "the first trade with Bitcoin" because, as pointed out by d5000, there were already Bitcoin trades with fiat earlier. But it was widely embraced as the first commercial Bitcoin use, the first time that a physical good was bought with Bitcoin as money. But, to clarify further, the pizzas weren't bought with Bitcoin from Papa John's. Somebody else bought them with fiat and have them delivered to Laszlo for Bitcoin.

It's a trade on New Liberty Standard exchange.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100428024753/http://newlibertystandard.wetpaint.com/page/2009+Exchange+Rate

It is mentioned in some other sources.
The Very Early Bitcoin Exchanges of 2009 to 2011.

https://bitcoin.zorinaq.com/price/

It's written in this Bitcoin history book at page 58.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M8z4M4oV4WC_aIGWkn-tO_T7Nkllj47C/view?usp=sharing