Check Your Closet: This 2009 Newspaper is Worth $250,000

News

By RC Staff

13 September 2023

Maybe it was the day of your wedding. Or the birth of your child. Perhaps you just have a bit of a hoarding problem. Whatever the reason, you’re in luck if you happen own this particular 2009 newspaper issue.

Do you own this newspaper?

Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

That’s the headline of the January 3rd, 2009 edition of The Times — a daily paper that’s been printed since the 1780s. It was actually the first newspaper to use “The Times”, and due to the widespread use of that title these days is commonly referred to as “The Times of London” or “The London Times”.

The rest of the paper is about typical 2009 things like the FA Cup, the Frost/Nixon film, and why Salman Rushdie won’t ever get married again (which turned out to be a lie, funny enough).

But the content of the paper isn’t what makes it special.

The Bitcoin Genesis Block

On the day this newspaper was published, something else that would change the course of history also happened. The anonymous developer known by pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin Genesis Block: the first ever block and definitive “start” of Bitcoin.

So the newspaper was released on the same day as Bitcoin. Why does that matter?

Well, it matters because Satoshi Nakamoto deliberately referenced the newspaper in the code of the block with this message:

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

Why did Satoshi reference this paper in particular? There’s a lot of speculation, ranging from him just wanting to date the code as written on that day, to it being a John Galt-esque deep critique of the world’s financial systems. Whatever the reason, as Bitcoin has grown, the demand for this paper as a collectible and mystique around it has grown in tandem.

How much is the newspaper worth?

The most recent verified sale of the newspaper took place on May 21st of 2019 via the Bitcoin Talk forum, for a price of 7.4 BTC ($60,000 USD at the time).

However, that was over 4 years ago at a time that the price of Bitcoin was much lower, and the Bitcoin collectibles market was far less mature. It can therefore be surmised that the current value of an authentic copy is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In fact, the cheapest verified authentic copy available for purchase online is currently listed at a whopping $250,000. Keep in mind, this paper was originally available for a retail price of £1.50 — so this is a price increase of around 13,368,900%. Not a bad ROI for a piece of paper.

How many copies of the newspaper exist?

And now, for perhaps the craziest part of this story…

As per the Audit Bureau of Circulations, an estimated 617,483 copies of The Times were circulated on a daily basis in January of 2019.

Yep, you read that right. More than half a million of these newspapers were printed. So, how many of these are left today? 

Well, the better question is: Who keeps a newspaper for 15 years?

Our best bets:

• People who had kids born on January 3rd, 2009 in and around London
• People that got married that day
• Locals that had stories about them or their businesses featured in the paper
• Hoarders (no offense — maybe your hoarding has paid off) 

With so many printed, it’s likely there are dozens, if not hundreds of copies out there… buried treasure, just waiting to be found…

While it’s too late to go to your local newsstand and grab a copy of this issue, there still are newspapers with collector value that come out semi-regularly. For example, just a few weeks ago, newspapers featuring President Trump’s mugshot that only cost a dollar or two were reselling on sites like eBay for markups as high as 1,000%. To be learn about more historical newspapers like this as they become available, and other items that resell for a profit, be sure to sign up for our newsletter today.