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This is an original BitInstant promotional T-shirt, one of the very few surviving garments from the Bitcoin 2013 Conference in San Jose, California, the first major Bitcoin conference in the United States, and a watershed moment in the history of digital money.

The black cotton shirt, emblazoned with the BitInstant logo in orange and blue, was produced for and worn during the conference. It was on this stage, in May 2013, that Charlie Shrem, co-founder of BitInstant and founding director of the Bitcoin Foundation , spoke alongside early pioneers Andreas Antonopoulos, Erik Voorhees, and Tony Gallippi, introducing Bitcoin to the wider world.

BitInstant was, at the time, one of the most important bridges between traditional finance and the new digital economy. By 2013, the company processed nearly 30% of all Bitcoin transactions worldwide, enabling everyday people to purchase Bitcoin instantly at thousands of retail locations across the United States. This was a period when Bitcoin was little understood outside a small circle of developers and visionaries; to those who were there, the San Jose conference was less a convention than a declaration of intent, that a decentralized, stateless currency was real and unstoppable.

Excerpt from Shrem’s forthcoming memoir (journal entry preserved in his own words):

I remember walking into the San Jose Convention Center wearing this exact shirt, nervous as hell, about to get on stage. There were maybe a thousand of us there, but it felt like the whole world was watching. None of us knew how big this would get, only that we were making history.

After my arrest in 2014, all of my Bitcoin and BitInstant memorabilia was left for trash in a box above a nightclub for years until my girlfriend (now wife) Courtney Warner luckily retrieved it.

This shirt, with its simple cotton fabric and corporate logo, stands today as a rare surviving relic of those early days , a tangible link to the moment Bitcoin first stepped into the global spotlight.

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