Bitcoin celebrates Pizza Day with price record, Hall of Fame induction

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Today’s Bitcoin Pizza Day is shaping up to be a special one.

Yes, it’s the first Pizza Day where the two pies in question are worth over $1 billion, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

No, sometime today, in the heart of New York City, in the back of a humble bar room, Laszlo Hanycez’s heroic contribution is going to be honored with something else — a simple metal plaque that represents his induction into the Bitcoin Hall of Fame.

Officially launching at Pubkey Bar and Restaurant, it’s a small addition to the 500 or so Hall of Fames estimated to have been established globally. It may even seem an odd choice. I can’t imagine, for instance, that many early Bitcoiners were enamored with sports accolades.

Yet, it’s a small reminder of something that gets lost in all the conversation around bitcoin’s march above $100,000 — that while bitcoin may be, objectively, the best store of value, value is itself subjective. As the Austrian economists learned (and fiat economists too often forget), it’s something we create and exchange through our actions.

So, I, for one, will be there to lend my support, because I value Laszlo’s sacrifice. Sure, he may have lost $1 billion, but he’s earned something far more: our respect and admiration for his intentions and his foresight.

And for that, I can’t think of anyone better to be inducted into the Bitcoin Hall of Fame.

— Rizzo

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On This Day

Bitcoin Pizza Day is really more of a Bitcoin Pizza Week.

It took four whole days for someone to take Laszlo Hanycez up on his offer of 10,000 BTC for two large pizzas.

“I like things like onions, peppers, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, pepperoni, etc.. just standard stuff no weird fish topping or anything like that. I also like regular cheese pizzas which may be cheaper to prepare or otherwise acquire,” he wrote on Bitcointalk.

Without willing counterparties, Laszlo even suggested that he raise his bid: “So nobody wants to buy me pizza? Is the bitcoin amount I’m offering too low?”

User BitcoinFX replied: “laszlo I would offer to buy you a pizza, but I’m not based in the USA, so they might think I’m a prank caller. If you don’t get any other offers I might look into how to go about buying you one online. Are you getting hungry or do you just like pizza?”

The next day, Laszlo would show picture proof that someone had finally done the deed. The deal was organized on IRC with early adopter Jeremy “Jercos” Studivant, who’d also been mining bitcoin around the same time via the cloud.

No question that Laszlo did a lot for Bitcoin with his passion for pizza. He also did a lot for Satoshi, even when he didn’t really feel like it.

Laszlo’s first pizza purchase would now be valued at $1.1 billion. An equivalent amount invested into Papa John’s stock would otherwise be worth $164.

In a 2018 interview, Laszlo gave perhaps the most candid insight into what it was like to develop Bitcoin alongside Satoshi in the very early days.

In total, Laszlo exchanged hundreds of emails with Satoshi across 2010, leading Bitcoin’s creator to frequently send tasks to complete.

“I thought bitcoin was awesome, and I wanted to be involved, but I had a regular developing job,” Hanyecz told Business Insider. “Nakamoto would send me emails like ‘Hey, can you fix this bug?’ ‘Hey, can you do this?’”

“He’d say, ‘Hey, the west side’s down,’ or ‘We have these bugs — we need to fix this.’ I’d be like, we? We’re not a team. I thought that it was approval from him, that maybe he accepted me as a member. But I didn’t want the responsibility. I didn’t really understand all of the forces that were going on at the time.”

Laszlo was clear that he deeply respected Satoshi, but there were still a few requests that didn’t sit quite right. “I brushed them off because I was like, who cares if this guy tells me to go pound sand and go away? This wasn’t my job or anything — it was a hobby.”

“I was trying to be friends with him. He seemed very paranoid about people breaking the software. He kept calling it ‘pre-release,’ and I was helping him get it to release.”

Bitcoin Core developers would only drop the “0.x” naming convention, which implied the software is still in beta, in 2021 — over a decade later. It was a symbolic move, representing Bitcoin’s maturation since Satoshi’s heyday. And so is Bitcoin Pizza Day.

— David

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