There is a difference between a direct purchase and a barter for goods.
I don't know why you and BlackHatCoiner mentioned that complicated examples. Jeremy was simply the payment processor. In today's supermarkets, most people pay with cards, and thus they pay to the payment processor (e.g. Visa). This is because the supermarkets don't have infrastructure to handle the card payment, they need an intermediary.
Jeremy did the same with Bitcoin: the pizza sellers didn't have the infrastructure to handle Bitcoin, so Jeremy stepped in and did that intermediary step.
The only thing which is different is the exchange rate conversion (1 "VisaUSD" is the same as 1 "BankUSD" and 1 "CentralBankUSD", while 1 BTC fluctuates to the USD), but here BHC brought up the example of an USD to EUR on-the-fly exchange on Amazon and that's quite much the same thing, only that Bitcoin isn't "legal tender" in the US (and was much less so in 2010).
in the pizza purchase, nothing would have worked without fiat! Nothing!
Yes but that wasn't the point of the question whether Jeremy did sell a "service" to Laszlo and thus Bitcoin was indeed used as money in that particular step of the trade. The whole point is that Jeremy accepted BTC.
This famous Alpaca Socks farm [1] was perhaps the first time (apart from that JPEG seller mentioned before, which is a bit dubious) where such an intermediary wasn't necessary because the Grass Hill Alpaca farm did accept BTC directly. There were some other services mentioned in that particular Slashdot post from February 2011:
- web hosting on vekja.net
- bitcoingadgets.com
- beauty products on myhealthyorganics.com
Grass Hill Alpacas seems to be the only domain still active. Of course, this was more than half a year later than Laszlo, although I don't know when these services started to accept BTC.
[1]
https://grasshillalpacas.com/our-bitcoin-story/[2]
https://slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/189246/Online-Only-Currency-BitCoin-Reaches-Dollar-Parityit's a detective work thing that will not lead to anything major.
But what's the point?
Journalists love such stuff to sell their articles. It would be a cool story - "a JPEG with [insert subject of the pic here] is actually the real Bitcoin Pizza" or so. We could even have a new Bitcoin mascot if the subject is nice. So I'm a bit surprised nobody did that in over 15 years. Perhaps that actually hints that the JPEG was never really sold. (@rodarmor, don't you want to
play detective pay some poor third world guy with your Ordinals millions to find that out, so you then can inscribe it as an Ordinal?)
