This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. Bitcoin Pizza Day is meant to celebrate the first-ever bitcoin payment for a physical good: Papa John’s pizza in 2010. But here’s a palate cleanser: Three days earlier, the founder of early MMORPG A Tale in the Desert adopted bitcoin for monthly subscriptions, apparently becoming the first commercial video game to do so. On This Day We’re cheating a little bit: Bitcoin MMO Day was actually yesterday, on May 19. At least, that was when Andrew “teppy” Tepper first announced he had opened his Ancient Egypt-themed online roleplaying game to bitcoin. “I run the MMO A Tale in the Desert. We charge $13.95/month for the game, and pay about $0.74 in merchant and gateway fees,” teppy wrote on Bitcointalk. “We’ll now accept Bitcoins as an alternate payment method. The price per month is 2,000 BTC, which according to the exchange is a discount right now.” He was right: Bitcoins traded for less than half a cent at the time, pricing one month worth of game time at only $9.20 if paid in BTC — a 33% discount. A screenshot from A Tale in the Desert circa 2010 shows a new frontier, just as Bitcoin was. Tepper had initially hoped to match in-game usernames with messages attached to each bitcoin transaction. Laszlo Hayncez, the Bitcoin Pizza Guy, quickly pointed out that messages could only be included when sending coins to IP addresses, a feature that was eventually removed in 2012 due to security concerns. “Hmm – is there any text field associated with an address based transaction? It does make accepting Bitcoins a bit more cumbersome. Would including such a text field as part of the protocol compromise anonymity somehow?” Tepper replied. Tepper’s quest spawned a discussion about encrypted messaging via transaction outputs that roped in Satoshi himself: “Bitcoin uses EC-DSA, which can only do digital signing, not encryption. RSA can do both, but I didn’t use it because it’s an order of magnitude bigger and would have been impractical.” Laszlo continued to help Tepper in engineering a secure solution to accept bitcoins, one that would generate a new bitcoin address for receiving each separate payment. It’s unclear whether such a system was ever implemented, but the address Tepper originally supplied for subscriptions received an eye-watering 42,100 BTC across 27 separate transactions in two months, worth around $3,600 back then but $4.4 billion today. Tepper went on to launch another MMORPG, Dragon’s Tale, three years later, based entirely around online gambling. Y’all got any more of those soldier statues?