Todaythe Bitcoin community worldwide commemorates May 22 as the first recorded day that Bitcoin was used to purchase a physical good. The community celebrates by buying two pizzas and sharing them. Pizza restaurants also contribute to the celebration by offering discounts to customers who pay in Bitcoin.
Laszlo responded to the delivery on BitcoinTalk.org by saying, "That pizza looks delicious! Adorable kid. (Cheesy Emoji)". He later stated that he was willing to pay 10,000 Bitcoins for future pizza deliveries. On the same thread, he stated, "My 1 year old daughter really enjoys pizza too! She just smears it all over her face if you give her a whole slice, but she does eventually manage to get most of it in her mouth (minus a few loose toppings of course)." It's a beautiful story. Laszlo took a family photo after the delivery marking perhaps one of the biggest milestones in the Bitcoin story.
The reason why the global Bitcoin community celebrates this event is mainly about Bitcoin as a technological revolution and invention of sound money. The year 2010 was about 24 months after the global financial crisis. People had begun to question the current economic models, economic policies, and money as a store of value. Bitcoin offered a new hope to the people.
The May 22 pizza transaction paved the way for a decentralized form of money with a hard capitalization of 21 million that can be sent and received without permission. The world had not yet seen a tamper-proof, sensor-proof digital currency with no centralized issuer.
Since May 22, 2010, the Bitcoin community has grown and developments have been made that allow you to buy a pizza using Bitcoin on the lightning network today, with transaction costs reduced to cents on the dollar. Thousands of merchants now accept Bitcoin payments for pizza and other products, and infrastructure has advanced to the point where you no longer need to post a bitcoin offer on BitcoinTalk.org to purchase a product.
If you owned a share of an experimental technology, how much of it would you give up to help that technology grow? Startup founders do this calculus whenever they raise capital. Ten years ago today, a developer named Laszlo Hanyecz did it with bitcoin.
Hanyecz is known as the first person to use bitcoin in a commercial transaction. On May 22, 2010, when bitcoin was a little over a year old, he bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC. The day is now known as "Bitcoin Pizza Day." With one bitcoin now worth $9,500, this is apparently a joke and Hanyecz's $45 million pizzas are the punchline.
The joke is also a parable, illustrating the competition and interplay between three potential uses of bitcoin. The first is speculation. Bitcoin's nosebleed-inducing decade of upward price movement is what drives CNBC headlines and motivates participation: People see it as a way to get rich. "Bitcoin is a way to harness greed," said Hanyecz in a recent interview from his home in Jacksonville, Fla. It's greed that underpins the delicate balance of incentives that keeps bitcoin running.
"Speculation" is sometimes treated as though it were not a legitimate use. It is, and it has been, an important part of bitcoin's DNA from birth. Even U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has spoken respectfully of bitcoin's role as a "speculative store of value."
The volatility that makes bitcoin attractive to investors also makes it difficult to use as money, or "electronic cash," as the Bitcoin white paper specifies. Hanyecz's solid-gold pizzas show us that if CoinDesk paid me in bitcoin, one of us would likely get rekt.
Or would we? Hanyecz works for apparel brand GORUCK as a developer and, partly because he is internet-famous, the e-commerce company is one of a handful that accepts bitcoin. It's a small volume, about two or three orders per week over the past two years, Hanyecz told me. But it's working out.
"We've just been holding it and we're actually up a significant amount," he said. "We had some people check out at $3,000, we had some people check out at $11,000. The dollar cost averaging people talk about, it works really well."
Bitcoin as digital gold, or a store of value to accumulate and hold for the long term, has proven more attractive than commerce, as a pair of recent events underscore. First, bitcoin's halving showed in real time bitcoin's inviolable issuance schedule all while central banks test just how much money they can print on demand. Then, on Wednesday, as I was writing down questions for Hanyecz and trying to home-school my kids, someone moved bitcoin that had been sitting in the same place since February 2009.
Hodling is part of what drives the value of bitcoin up, as low velocity can do for any currency. But low velocity can't be the whole story, as Hanyecz realized early on, looking at bitcoin as an experiment.
As widely known and held as bitcoin may be, it's still an experiment. With hedge fund household names placing long-term bets on its viability as "digital gold," that narrative seems set in stone. In fact, it's malleable, like the metal. Ten years from now, it may seem as absurd as a $45 million pizza.
Hanyecz is known as the first person to use bitcoin in a commercial transaction. On May 22, 2010, when bitcoin was a little over a year old, he bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC. The day is now known as \"Bitcoin Pizza Day.\" With one bitcoin now worth $9,500, this is apparently a joke and Hanyecz's $45 million pizzas are the punchline.
The joke is also a parable, illustrating the competition and interplay between three potential uses of bitcoin. The first is speculation. Bitcoin's nosebleed-inducing decade of upward price movement is what drives CNBC headlines and motivates participation: People see it as a way to get rich. \"Bitcoin is a way to harness greed,\" said Hanyecz in a recent interview from his home in Jacksonville, Fla. It's greed that underpins the delicate balance of incentives that keeps bitcoin running.
\"Speculation\" is sometimes treated as though it were not a legitimate use. It is, and it has been, an important part of bitcoin's DNA from birth. Even U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has spoken respectfully of bitcoin's role as a \"speculative store of value.\"
The volatility that makes bitcoin attractive to investors also makes it difficult to use as money, or \"electronic cash,\" as the Bitcoin white paper specifies. Hanyecz's solid-gold pizzas show us that if CoinDesk paid me in bitcoin, one of us would likely get rekt.
As widely known and held as bitcoin may be, it's still an experiment. With hedge fund household names placing long-term bets on its viability as \"digital gold,\" that narrative seems set in stone. In fact, it's malleable, like the metal. Ten years from now, it may seem as absurd as a $45 million pizza.
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Bitcoin is currently bullish (100%), which suggests that now is a bad time to sell BTC for USD. This trend is determined by the technical indicators on our Bitcoin price prediction page. To determine whether a coin is bearish or bullish, we use technical indicators such as the Relative Strength Index (RSI) and important simple and exponential moving averages.
The other reason people may not be using bitcoin to buy and sell is because of how much its value changes every day. Wolfe found that bitcoin is six to 10 times more volatile compared to even the most unstable global currencies, such as the Turkish lira.
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