Alpacas & Bitcoin: How Our Farm Wandered Into Crypto History
Back in 2011, a pair of socks from our farm helped kick off something nobody saw coming (well David kinda did).
We’ve raised alpacas for years—good animals, warm fleece, the kind of quiet farm life that doesn’t usually end up in any history books. Then David got an idea. He’d been reading about a strange new digital money called Bitcoin, back when almost no one had heard of it and a single coin was worth less than a dollar. He asked if we’d sell our alpaca socks for it. Honestly, it sounded like a Ponzi scheme to us. But we figured, as long as you’ll pay us in dollars… until our hay supplier takes bitcoin…
That February, a post on a tech site called Slashdot listed the handful of real things you could actually buy with Bitcoin. Our farm was on it. Orders started coming in—first a trickle, then from Finland, Russia, all over. Our socks became one of the very first real-world things anyone bought with the currency. Even one of Bitcoin’s lead developers bought several pairs.
The price tells the whole story of those early days. We started out charging 75 Bitcoin for a pair of socks. By that summer the currency had climbed so fast we had to drop the price to 5. We’ll let you do the math on what those socks would be worth today. And no, unfortunately we didn’t keep them.
Somewhere along the way the alpaca became a kind of unofficial mascot for Bitcoin—there were jokes, there was even a song. None of it was planned. We were just a family farm that said yes to a strange idea and ended up with a small, permanent place in the story of how digital money got started.
We’re proud of that. Not for what any of it is worth, but because the best things often start small, local, and a little bit ridiculous.
A note on the “Alpaca” meme coin — please read
Since people keep asking: yes, there’s a meme coin that uses our name and our 2011 story. The folks who made it have visited the farm and pointed the coin’s built-in “creator rewards” at us, so we receive a small percentage from it. We also bought a small amount ourselves, for the fun of it—and we may buy or sell it at any time, for any reason. We’re telling you all of this up front so you can weigh anything we say accordingly.
And we mean this sincerely: we are not telling you to buy it, and nothing here is investment advice. According to David, meme coins are wildly speculative, and most of them go to zero. People lose real money on them every day, and 2026 has been a circus of “get rich quick” coins that mostly enrich whoever launched them. If you ever buy one, only use money you’d be fine lighting on fire.
The only reason we list the address is so you can tell the real one from the impostors—there are knockoffs using our name that we have nothing to do with and get nothing from. This is not a recommendation to buy it:
AE7gr74vQqdYhMEGQCdZRZjHn5TovkCJbWwirgDkpump
(Always verify an address yourself—scammers copy and tweak these.)
If you want to support the farm, buy a pair of socks. That’s the part of this story we’re most proud of.