The auction house Scarce.City announced the sale of a notebook with the inscription Buy Bitcoin. The piece of paper became a meme thanks to a televised broadcast from the US Congress seven years ago. The lot sold for 16 BTC (about $1 million).

The lot became a record price for the auction house. The notepad sale event took place at a Bitcoin bar called Pub Key in New York City. According to the information provided by the auction house, the new owner of the iconic item was an anonymous client under the nickname Squirrekkywrath. He is considered an industry veteran in the cryptocurrency community.

The proceeds from the sale of the notebook are promised to be used for the development of a crypto-wallet on the Lightning network based on the decentralized Urbit platform. The founder of the project is Christian Langalis, the author of the inscription on the notebook.

A notepad with the letters “Buy Bitcoin” scrawled on it became a meme after it was caught on television during a speech by Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen in 2017.

Christian Langalis, then a 22-year-old congressional intern, showed the inscription from behind the official in the middle of a meeting of the House Financial Services Committee. A little later, the intern (a little later he would receive the Internet nickname Bitcoin Sign Guy) was forcibly removed from the premises. And the inscription itself received cult status.

Previously, a digital art image of Genesis Cat, created by the Taproot Wizards project team as an NFT on the Ordinals protocol, was sold for $254,000 at Sotheby's auction.