'Bitcoin Baby' Soon To Be a Teenager

'Twelve years ago, a baby was born after someone used bitcoin to pay for a frozen egg IVF,' writes longtime Slashdot reader bobdevine. 'I, for one, welcome...'

Blockworks tells the story of how it all came to be: In February 2012 -- almost two years after Laszlo's pizzas -- a fertility doctor named C. Terence Lee set about a personal and professional quest to onboard his patients to Bitcoin by accepting BTC for his services. He started with a 'Bitcoin accepted here' sign in his window, and then a Reddit post.

'Jumping in to do my part to support the BTC economy. This may be a historic first?' Lee wrote in a post on the BitMarket subreddit, titled: '[WTS][USA] Male Fertility Evaluation.' Lee was offering a 15-minute consultation to discuss fertility questions and a sperm analysis in exchange for 15 BTC, valued at $70 or so at the time. 'Actual value over $100,' he wrote. Within three months, he'd found a Bitcoin customer.

'The patient turned out not... so much having a burning desire to know about his fertility, but he was a Bitcoin enthusiast, and he liked the idea of participating in history, in this ritual ceremony of what could be perhaps the world's first Bitcoin medical transaction,' Lee explained at a 2013 conference in San Jose. 'So we chatted about Bitcoin. He taught me a lot about mining. That's how he acquired bitcoin. And we did a sperm test, and it turned out he had really good sperm... after it was done he sent me 15 bitcoins... '

Lee changed up his strategy to only quiz his most trusted patients. There was one couple, who, on their fourth attempt at IVF, agreed to pay in bitcoin for a 50% discount, with Lee walking them through exchanging U.S. dollars for bitcoin via CryptoXChange, a now-defunct exchange operating out of Australia. The sperm stuck, leading CNN to reveal, on this day in 2013, 'the world's first Bitcoin baby' -- a baby bought entirely with bitcoin. Thirty bitcoin to be exact, an amount then worth $500, or $3 million today.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.