Crypto enthusiast ‘Litecoin Lisa’ just announced the first sale of a car for Bitcoin at Bob Moore Subaru, a car dealership in Oklahoma City, Oklahomo. The purchase marks a year-long effort by the dealership to help drive crypto adoption.
Says Lisa,
“We’ve been working on accepting Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum at my husband’s dealership, Bob Moore Subaru, for over a year now, and we’ve had our first sale of a car.”
The new (used car) owner, a physician and entrepreneur named Dr. Ken, says he got interested in Bitcoin around 2008 or 2009. He started mining the cryptocurrency at his place of employment at that time, after ordering a miner from Scandinavia.
Once it arrived about a year later, he says it took him another month to mine a Bitcoin.
Says Dr. Ken,
“I overheard the facilities manager walking around wondering what was running and what had caused the electric bills to double that month.”Â
He eventually sold the miner for $1,000.
“I thought that was the big win – and sat on 1.2 Bitcoin for about 10 years.”
When Bitcoin hit nearly $20,000 in December of 2017, his wife told him to cash out. But he says it wasn’t so simple.
“I have to be honest – I had a little trouble figuring out how to cash out. I think in Dallas we have a couple of Bitcoin ATMs but they’re in kinda sketchy areas of town.”
Ultimately, he says he rode Bitcoin back down to $5,000 after its all-time high. It wasn’t until years later, when he realized that his 16-year-old daughter needed a car, that he thought about cashing out.
“I’ve always told my kids that they’re going to buy their own car but my oldest daughter actually runs a nonprofit and is doing amazing work and also goes to a talented and gifted school. So between the work that she’s doing, which actually probably takes 20 to 40 hours a week – it is a job in and of itself – and between that and school, I’m not going to make her stop that to go work at McDonald’s to save up money to buy a car.
So I said, ‘Hey, I’ll pitch some money in. I’ll get you a car. Then I started researching: who takes Bitcoin for cars. And Bob Moore in Oklahoma appears to be the only dealership that will take Bitcoin for a used car.”
Bob Moore says they accept crypto for new and used vehicles as well as service items via merchant payment company Aliant Payments.
Litecoin Lisa also explained why she’s drawn to blockchain technology. After having lost her seven-year-old daughter to lymphoma and having endured the need to gather vital records during an emergency situation, Lisa believes blockchain is an instrumental technology for the medical industry.
As for the efforts of Dr. Ken’s daughter who runs a nonprofit organization with her sister, he says they are driven to help girls in Ethiopia who don’t have clean drinking water. They’ve raised funds by making origami ornaments and exchanging them for donations at a local Starbucks with an initial goal of purchasing a deep water well in Ethiopia. After their first night of fundraising, they made over $800. They adjusted their target and within two months they raised $10,000.
Says Dr. Ken,
“Fast forward – now eight years they’ve been doing this. They have raised over $2 million and they have funded over 200 projects in 20 countries.”
He says his daughters enjoy providing water and trying to help kids go to school in developing countries. Their nonprofit is called PaperforWater.org.
Litecoin Lisa says her next goal is to get the daughters set up with a crypto wallet and to ask for donations from the crypto community.
In addition to Dr. Ken’s two daughters, he says he has a third daughter – and about $2,000 left in BTC.
He adds,
“Who knows, if Bitcoin goes to $100,000, then I’ve got another $20,000 to spend on another daughter.”
