Laszlo made that offer of 10,000 BTC for two pizzas to boost the use of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. He repeated that purchase eight years later, but he did it through the Lightning network.
Bitcoin (BTC) allows people to save and protect money safely and without losing value over time. Although many experts encourage holders not to sell their bitcoins even if the price drops, its first use case was transactional.
The programmer Laszlo Hanyecz made the first transaction with that cryptocurrency on May 22nd, 2010. He bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC, currently equivalent to about USD 300 million.
As Hanyecz was one of the first miners on the Bitcoin network, he could accumulate many coins daily. However, the abundance of bitcoins at the time was not what prompted him to spend them.
Laszlo made that offer of 10,000 BTC for two pizzas to boost the use of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. In 2018, he repeated that purchase, but he did it through the Lightning network.
Programmer Laszlo Hanyecz Helps Bitcoin While Buying Pizza
In 2010, it was easy to mine the Bitcoin network with a CPU or desktop computer. Doing it better every day aroused the curiosity and ingenuity of Laszlo and other programmers.
Laszlo implemented graphics processing units (GPUs) for mining because they had more power for Proof of Work (PoW). After the equipment became obsolete, Bitcoin switched to ASICs, highly specialized and energy-intensive hardware.
The purchase of those pizzas became more popular than he expected, so he kept doing it as many times as possible. As the mining difficulty increased to match the hash rate, he did not spend all the coins he had mined.
The programmer released the first GPU miner in May 2010, contributing to the hash rate by then. He believes that he was helping to develop an open-source project while buying pizza with his code.
The Purchase of Two Pizzas Is the Start of the Bitcoin Economy
The first miners accumulated thousands of Bitcoin with their CPUs, but the increasing difficulty left their equipment obsolete. In contrast, there is currently an enormous industry around that activity.
Miners do not need to accumulate Bitcoin to sustain their operations but deal with lenders and energy providers and outsource their services instead.
That activity started domestically for those who used Bitcoin in its early years. However, it now has large industrial structures and publicly-traded companies.
However, the desire to encourage individual responsibility continues, as many miners have brought Bitcoin mining back to their homes.
What Laszlo dreamed of has come true, as Bitcoin is a payment network with a global reach. The cryptocurrency has become a powerful financial tool for financially isolated countries to allow transactions without restrictions or censorship.
Bitcoin is trading at around USD 29,299 and has accumulated a 2.9% loss over the last 24 hours. While its daily trading volume is above USD 25.35 billion, its market capitalization is about USD 557.72 billion, according to CoinGecko.
By Alexander Salazar
