BitGo engineer Mason Bord has announced his advance payment for a new model of Tesla electric car made via bitcoin digital currency and Shakepay credit card.

In his blog post, Bord recalls that the first bitcoin payment ever was carried out back in 2010; the object of the purchase then was two pizzas from Papa John's restaurant. In 2011, it turned possible to buy socks of alpaca wool with bitcoins. In 2016, the latest model of Tesla electric car has become easy to pre-order using bitcoin digital currency.

Interested in the electric vehicle technology since 2007 when he first read about the Tesla Roadster model, Bord visited Tesla production plant in 2010 and was delighted with the electric car. “I had to have one”, he writes.

Six years later, Bord finally had a chance to combine his two passions, acquiring an electric car with bitcoins.

He did so by getting a one-time-use bitcoin Shakepay credit part which he could transfer his BitGo-stored bitcoins to, and made an instant prepayment at Tesla official website. The payment sum amounted to 2.413612 bitcoins (about $1,000).

“The world will only get weirder,” Bord quotes another developer Steve Coast, the founder of a web-mapping project OpenStreetMap. “I just preordered an automobile that I have never seen or touched, which is propelled by electrons flowing through copper wires.”

“I preordered this vehicle with an invisible currency that was invented by a pseudo-anonymous computer programmer who calls himself Satoshi Nakamoto and is likely not Japanese,” continues Bord. “I made this purchase using a service that dispenses ephemeral credit cards made by some Canadian guy that I met online named Jean…. Weird.”

The new Tesla model was unveiled last week. The base price of the electric car starts from $35,000. Pre-orders backlog for this model has exceeded 276,000 units.

Elena Platonova