Today, the Bitcoin community celebrated the worst investment in the history of modern man. Five years ago today, a member of the currently offline bitcoin forum bought a pizza for 10,000 bitcoins, a deal currently valued at nearly two and 1/2 million dollars.
In May, 2010, early bitcoin enthusiast and programmer Laszlo Hanyecz offered the bitcoins to anyone that could get him two Papa John’s pizzas delivered to his home. The bitcoin value was approximately $25.00 at the time of the transaction.
I’ll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas.. like maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day. I like having left over pizza to nibble on later. You can make the pizza yourself and bring it to my house or order it for me from a delivery place, but what I’m aiming for is getting food delivered in exchange for bitcoins where I don’t have to order or prepare it myself, kind of like ordering a ‘breakfast platter’ at a hotel or something, they just bring you something to eat and you’re happy!
Laszlo obtained his endless stacks of bitcoins by circumventing the outlined procedure for mining bitcoins and using his powerful video graphics rig instead. This “ticked off” Satoshi since it meant less bitcoins for him and the rest of the people mining with their much slower computer CPUs.
Satoshi was so upset by the stunt that he sent Mr. Hanyecz a verbal tongue lashing via private email message.
A big attraction to new users is that anyone with a computer can generate some free coins. When there are 5000 users, that incentive may fade, but for now it’s still true. GPUs would prematurely limit the incentive to only those with high end GPU hardware. It’s inevitable that GPU compute clusters will eventually hog all the generated coins, but I don’t want to hasten that day.
In honor of these momentous events some payment sites are offering discounted pizza to bitcoin holders. Snapcard is offering $5 off any pizza bought with bitcoin, and you can order a slice for kids at Bernard & Millie Duker Children’s Hospital. You can also just grab a pie from Pizza For Coins.
Did you celebrate today? Maybe next year, New Egg will offer discounts on high-end GPUs? Log in below using your favorite social network and weigh in on the discussion.
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