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The first item purchased with Bitcoin was an NFT?

He was not claiming the JPEG to not be copiable, but he was claiming that he would send the original image that he had created to the person who completed the BTC transaction with him. It's not even clear if he was successful to find someone to take the other end of his offered trade of individually created jpeg for 500 BTC.
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The address he posted received 500 bitcoins on 24 Feb 2010, so it's likely he was successful eventually.