The Skals of Bitcoin Twitter sang from the historic moment, the “first real purchase” with Bitcoin, and the experts engraved the story in the memory of the Internet with the big titles on the infamous purchase of Bitcoin pizza, now very appreciated at more than a billion dollars.
But what happens if I told you that Hanyecz has spent almost 10 times more bitcoin after historical purchase? And, what happens if I told you that Hanyecz may have done it as ostensible penance for his much more consecutive contribution to Bitcoin in his early childhood?
He was a bitcoin technical pioneer
The darkness of the purchase of Hanyecz’s pizza day has overshadowed its two seminal contributions to the early technical development of Bitcoin.
This message originally appeared on BlockSpace Media, where Colin Harper is editor -in -chief.
The first of them came on April 19, 2010, just a few days after Hanyecz signed up in BitcoinTalk, a forum established by Satoshi Nakamoto which was (and is still) a water hole for the Bitcoin technician. Hanyecz created the first macOS customer for Bitcoin Core, the original and still dominant software implementation for the nodes underlying the Bitcoin network.
Satoshi initially coded Bitcoin for Windows and Linux, but Hanyecz’s innovation allowed macOS devices to execute the software. His contribution made the basics of all Bitcoin portfolios and applications compatible with macOS that would follow him.
But probably bigger than it was the discovery of Hanyecz that he could use Bitcoin with the graphics card of his computer (GPU). Until this point, the first adopters used their computer processing units (CPU) to exploit Bitcoin, and as GPUs are more powerful orders of magnitude than processors for the task, this innovation has propelled the extraction of Bitcoin in front much faster than Satoshi.
“Mac Mac OS X Binary … He will use your GPU to generate bitcoins. It works very well if you have a good GPU like a NVIDIA 8800 or something like that,” wrote Hanyecz in a BitcoinTalk article on May 10, 2010.
The discovery triggered the first rush to Bitcoin’s digital gold. The Total Hashrate of Bitcoin exploded up 130,000% at the end of the year, and for the first time, Bitcoin miners began to build mining farms on a small scale. These configurations – slapped together in basements and attics, garages and hangars – were the prototypes of the Bitcoin mining farms on a industrial scale which dominate the Bitcoin network today.
The pizza was painful
The invention of Hanyecz was so substantial that it earned him a virtual place of Satoshi Nakamoto himself. And it is possible that the conversation that followed inspired the famous purchase of the day of the Hanyecz pizza.
“A great attraction for new users is that anyone with a computer can generate free parts,” Satoshi wrote in Hanyecz. “GPUs would prematurely limit the incentive to those with high -end GPU equipment. It is inevitable that the GPU calculation clusters end up putting all the generated parts, but I don’t want to speed up that day. ”
In an interview in 2019 for Bitcoin magazine, Hanyecz told me that he “had stopped publishing [GPU mining] After that. “
“I said to myself:” Dude, I feel like I have opened your project. Sorry, guy. He feared that some people would be discouraged because they cannot exploit a block with a processor, “said Hanyecz.
Perhaps this conversation encouraged Hanyecz to offer 10,000 BTC for two large pizzas from Papa John on this fateful day in May 15 years ago. In fact, he has made the offer more than once. During the 2019 interview, Hanyecz told me that he had spent nearly 100,000 BTC in the year that followed.
“I spent [all my bitcoin] On pizza a long time ago, “Hyyecz wrote in a BitcoinTalk Post in February 2014.” Apart from a little change to a figure, I spent everything I extracted. As you all know, the difficulty increases to adapt to the hashness, so ultimately the mining was not worth it for me. »»
Looking at a Bitcoin address, Hanyecz listed in its first BitcoinTalk, Hanyecz received and spent 81,432 BTC from this address from April to November 2010. This sum was worth a little more than $ 8.6 billion today.
Wallet 2010 by Laszlo Hanyecz Balance History | Source: mempool.space
There is no way to check if Hanyecz spent all of this on pizza, other goods or if he simply gave Bitcoin to new members of BitcoinTalk, a common practice at the time when Bitcoin was close to value without value. But he mentioned in his original thread for the purchase of pizza that it was “an open offer”, although he returned this in August by saying: “I cannot really allow myself to continue doing it because I can no longer generate thousands of pieces per day. Thank you to everyone who has already bought me pizza. ”
The original purchase, not to mention those recurring who apparently occurred afterwards, would be enough to keep any healthy person at night while Bitcoin walks above $ 100,000. But in 2019, at least Hanyecz compressed the test with good humor. Seeing him, he committed a culinary alchemy, transmuting his electricity and his calculation power in a cheap dinner. He did not know that Bitcoin would command the price he makes today, so the transaction was a victory in his book.
“A business occurs because the two parties think they get a good deal,” he said. “I felt like I beat the internet, get free food. I said to myself:” Dude, I got linked to these GPUs, now I go mine twice as fast. I’m just going to eat free food; I will never have to buy food again … ”
“I mean, I coded this thing and exploited Bitcoin and I felt like I was winning that day. I had a pizza for contributing to an open-source project. Usually, the pastime is a well and a money well, and in this case, my hobby bought the dinner.”
