The anonymous dentist might have lost potentially millions of dollars on video games.
By Wahid Pessarlay
Editor Julia Sakovich
Updated
2 mins read
An anonymous Macedonian dentist, who goes by Darko to stay private, claims he used Bitcoin BTC $104 014 24h volatility: 0.8% Market cap: $2.07 T Vol. 24h: $45.59 B earlier than the Bitcoin Pizza Day.
In an interview with Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), Darko said that he used to compete for prizes in Bitcoin at the multiplayer online battle game DotA in the late 2000s.
“I was an 18-year-old kid; I didn’t take it seriously,” he added.
Darko, who is now a 35-year-old dentist, says he spent “10 or 20” BTC every month to purchase video games when he was a teenager.
However, competing for prizes doesn’t mean that Darko got paid to play DotA. The original DotA was a custom mod for Warcraft III, developed by the community, with no built-in payment systems. In simple terms, he was likely competing for informal community prizes.
Darko completely forgot about his Bitcoin spending until 2016, when he opened a dental clinic, and heard an employee pointing at mining digital gold.
If Darko’s claims are true, he and the DotA community were likely the first real-world Bitcoin users.
This would beat the Bitcoin Pizza Day, which happened on May 22, 2010, as the first documented real-world BTC transaction — programmer Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC to purchase two pizzas.
The historic transaction would now be worth over a billion dollars.
Despite the very early Bitcoin adoption from the country’s gamer community, North Macedonia still lacks a clear legal framework for cryptocurrencies.
Without clear rules, investors feel unsure, and this slows down the growth of crypto in the country.
Disclaimer: Coinspeaker is committed to providing unbiased and transparent reporting. This article aims to deliver accurate and timely information but should not be taken as financial or investment advice. Since market conditions can change rapidly, we encourage you to verify information on your own and consult with a professional before making any decisions based on this content.
Wahid has been analyzing and reporting on the latest trends in the decentralized ecosystem since 2019. He has over 4,000 articles to his name and his work has been featured on some of the leading outlets including Yahoo Finance, Investing.com, Cointelegraph, and Benzinga. Other than reporting, Wahid likes to connect the dots between DeFi and macro on his newsletter, On-chain Monk.
