HOW DO I GET BITCOIN?
Bitcoin reached a US-dollar price of $1,000 on Mt. Gox on 27 November 2013.
The kitchen has not changed. The dishes still need drying, the coffee is cooling and the computer occupies a corner of an ordinary table. But the number on the screen has acquired another digit. The man leans closer, his hand suspended above the keyboard, as if looking again might make it easier to believe. The whole moment fits between one keystroke and the next.
On 27 November 2013, bitcoin reached $1,000 on the Mt. Gox exchange in a price quoted directly in US dollars. The venue matters: BTC China had already crossed the equivalent value in yuan earlier that month, and prices were not identical across exchanges. This card marks the Mt. Gox dollar milestone, rather than a single synchronized price for the entire world.
In WIRED's report that day, market-data entrepreneur Dan Held described a change in the questions coming from people around him. They were moving from asking what Bitcoin was to asking how to get it. The card's phrase borrows that latter question. It captures the widening curiosity around the price, without pretending that these were the words of the fictional man in the picture.
Four figures made a digital experiment harder to ignore. Here, that shift arrives through a modest monitor among everyday household objects. There is no visible fortune and no transaction being celebrated, just a person absorbing an unfamiliar number. The domestic scene is imagined; its story is the gap between a market milestone and the ordinary room in which someone first notices it.
Sources & the artist’s interpretation
CoinDesk's 27 November report distinguishes the Mt. Gox dollar threshold from the earlier yuan-equivalent crossing. WIRED's same-day report provides Held's comments and the question used on the card. Character, room, lighting, interface, graph and props are illustrative. The cup and empty boxes are deliberate collection references.
