In what way? That was the market price of bitcoin at the time When Laszlo made the offer on bitcointalk, there were replies saying they could get slightly better price in IRC market place The mindset at the time was to spread adoption, I came in much later but message was still the same to spend the bitcoin and buy back the same amount or more This encouraged merchants to adopt bitcoin as a payment method Of course now that bitcoin is widely adopted that we can buy just about anything with it, no one wants to spend bitcoin anymore,