A BITCOIN enthusiast bought a £150,000 Lamborghini after buying £80 of crypto.
Peter Saddington, 39, a computer coder from Atlanta, Georgia, bought the supercar after the price of the digital coin surged 320,000 per cent in seven years.
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The car fanatic bought 45 Bitcoins for less than £80 ($115) in 2011 when the price of the cryptocurrency dropped 90 per cent.
He paid £150,000 ($200,000) for the 2015 Lamborghini Huracan with a white matte wrap.
Incredibly, his 45 Bitcoins today would be worth more than £1,7million.
Peter, who studied computer science, began studying the currency when it fell to under £2.30 ($3).
He told CNBC: “As a technologist and someone who likes to take risky bets with new technology, I thought it was really intriguing.
“I took about a month to research it, look back in the code, look back in the white paper.”
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Peter won’t reveal how many Bitcoins he currently owns, but he purchased more than 1,000 when he spoke to CNBC in 2018.
He said he’s a “long term” buyer of the coin and has been purchasing new crypto every Friday for years.
The coder, who is the CTO of VinWiki, a start-up that provides automotive histories for used cars, has two YouTube channels about cryptocurrency.
Speaking about his supercar purchase, Peter confirmed he paid for it using Bitcoin.
He said: “The car was on consignment from an individual and the individual took bitcoin directly.
“For me it is a great marketing tool, it is a great conversation piece.”
BITCOIN SUPERCAR
Pietro Frigerio, the general manager at the Lamborghini dealership, said his company don’t actually accept crypto as payment but do facilitate deals between private owners and buyers.
He said: “We do not really take bitcoin, we do not speculate on [the] exchange rate.
“We just facilitate the owner of bitcoin by running the transaction through a payment service.”
There are almost 20,000 locations across the world where you can use the virtual currency in real-life shops as well as online, according to website Coinmap.
Some UK car dealerships accept Bitcoin as payment for their vehicles.
RISKY BUSINESS
US electric car firm Tesla previously accepted the digital coin as payment – however boss Elon Musk scrapped it because mining the currency is bad for the environment.
Crypto can be riskier than other investments because they are volatile and speculative – their price often rising and falls very quickly, sometimes seemingly for not reason.
Many cryptocurrencies have a short track record, making them difficult to understand and predict.
This type of investment is also not protected by the regulator which means you have no protection if things go wrong.
The risks of buying with cryptocurrencies
Investing and making a purchase in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin is risky .
Their value is highly volatile and City watchdog the Financial Conduct Authority has warned investors should be prepared to lose all their money.
Investing in cryptocurrencies is not a guaranteed way to make money.
You should also think carefully about making purchases with a cryptocurrency.
For example, Bitcoin has had wild price fluctuations in recent months and the price can change on an almost hourly basis.
The price of a Bitcoin was at $40,258 on January 9, according to Coindesk, but fell to $34,214 just three days later.
That’s a 15% drop.
These price swings are risky for a business as you could sell an item for a Bitcoin at one price and the value may drop soon after, leaving you with less money from a sale.
Similarly, the price of Bitcoin has soared by more than 21% since the start of this week so it can be hard for a shopper to get an accurate idea of the price of an item if its value changes on a daily basis.
