The True Story behind Bitcoin Pizza Day

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Here's what Satoshi wrote to the man responsible for Pizza Day, Laszlo Hanecz -- a r/bitcoin exclusive from "Digital Gold"

Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper

Good Morning Bitcoins

I’m Mad Bitcoins

and this is... The True Story behind Bitcoin Pizza Day

Bitcoin pizza day is not just another day for promoting bitcoin, eating pizza or promoting your cleverly cloaked altcoin pretending to be bitcoin. Satoshi was much smarter than that. Satoshi left behind lessons.

Have you ever asked yourself? How did Laszlo Hanecz, the buyer of the Bitcoin Pizza actually get all those bitcoins that he spent that fateful May 22nd, 2010?

Satoshi’s response was mixed:

A big attraction to new users -- Satoshi said -- 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 clusters will eventually hog all the generated coins, but I don't want to hasten that day. If the difficulty gets really high, that increases the value of each coin since the supply becomes more limited. The supply is the same: 50 coins every 10 minutes.

But GPUs are much less evenly distributed, so the generated coins only go towards rewarding 20% of the people for joining the network instead of 100%.

I don't mean to sound like a socialist, I don't care if wealth is concentrated, but for now, we get more growth by giving that money to 100% of the people than giving it to 20%. Also, the longer we can delay the GPU arms race, the more mature the OpenCL libraries get, and the more people will have OpenCL compatible video cards. If we see from the difficulty factor that someone is using too much GPU, we can certainly pick this OpenCL stuff up again.

Maybe my effort to maintain GPU innocence is running out of time. It's worked out so far.

-- Satoshi Nakamoto

Thanks to Laszlo, Nathaniel and his new book Digital Gold for sharing this piece of Bitcoin history.

Now go out there and enjoy your Bitcoin Pizza Day!

Remember to always hold your private keys
and if you can’t tell what the product is,
the product is probably you.

Until next time
this has been...
MadBitcoins
MadBitcoins?
Mad Bitcoins

[VentionMGTOW]

Thanks for pointing out bitcoin Pizza Day. I wold have missed it.
Yeah, the centralized mining pools would probably have turned him off too.
Kind of sad the way the energy of the bitcoin community has been circling the drain, along with the bitcoin price. The transaction rate is pretty stable though so it seems that people are still continuing to use the currency. The bitcoin price also seems to have bottomed (finally!!!). 2014 has been a LONG year, watching the price drop and drop like this has been painful. I stopped buying several months ago, right when the price bottomed, LOL. I'm going to wait a month or two more before I start buying again (probably 500 dollars worth a month along with 500 into silver) Silver is rock solid and goes up in price during scary economic times and as soon as we get another cyprus style bail-in, we'll probably see renewed interest in bitcoins and a recovery in it's price. The value of a currency that's resistant to government theft increases when government theft becomes more obvious to the public.

[ontheblockchain]

Fascinating.  Makes me wonder how Satoshi felt about the ASIC miners...

[MrWhisperASMR]

I can' t believe it Bitcoin Pizza day again, Thanks for all the videos Thomas!

[TheCryptotariancom]

That was really interesting. I never knew that. Imagine what would happen if Satoshi posted a email or any form of communication stating his thoughts on how Bitcoin has developed.   Loved the end.

[willpangman]

Love the t-swift poetry, Mad. Keep it coming :D

[KurtRobinson]

Hey Mr. MadBitcoins, a little suggestion. If you're going to promote a book on Amazon, you may as well use an affiliate link. Your audience trusts you and knows you're making recommendations that you believe in, so why not make a little profit from it? Have a good one

[billmuertos]

As of January 20th 2021 it's worth $347million.

[anewascension]

Beard...gone...waaaait a minute. Who are you really and what have you done with, Thomas!?