The skalds of Bitcoin Twitter have sung of the historic moment, the “first real world purchase” with bitcoin, and pundits have etched the story into the internet’s memory with headlines about the infamous Bitcoin Pizza Purchase, now dearly valued at more than $1 billion.
But what if I told you that Hanyecz spent nearly 10 times more bitcoin following the historic purchase? And, what if I told you that perhaps Hanyecz did so as ostensible penance for his much more consequential contribution to Bitcoin in its uncertain infancy?
He was a Bitcoin technical pioneer
The penumbra of Hanyecz’s Pizza Day purchase has overshadowed his two seminal contributions to Bitcoin’s early technical development.
This post originally appeared on Blockspace Media, where Colin Harper is editor-in-chief.
The first of these came on April 19, 2010, just days after Hanyecz registered for Bitcointalk, a forum established by Satoshi Nakamoto that was (and still is) a watering hole for Bitcoin’s techie intelligentsia. Hanyecz created the first MacOS client for Bitcoin Core, the original and still-dominant software implementation for the nodes that underpin the Bitcoin network.
Satoshi originally coded Bitcoin for Windows and Linux, but Hanyecz’s innovation enabled MacOS devices to run the software too. His contribution laid the foundation for all MacOS-enabled bitcoin wallets and applications that would follow it.
But arguably greater than this was Hanyecz’s discovery that he could mine bitcoin with his computer’s graphics card (GPU). Until this point, early adopters used their computer processing units (CPUs) to mine bitcoin, and since GPUs are orders of magnitude more powerful than CPUs for the task, this innovation propelled bitcoin mining forward much faster than Satoshi expected.
“Updated Mac OS X binary…It will use your GPU to generate bitcoins. This works really well if you have a good GPU like an NVIDIA 8800 or something like that,” Hanyecz wrote in a May 10, 2010 Bitcointalk post.
The discovery ignited Bitcoin’s first digital gold rush. Bitcoin’s total hashrate exploded upward by 130,000% by the end of the year, and for the first time, bitcoin miners began constructing small-scale mining farms. These setups – slapped together in basements and attics, garages and sheds – were the prototypes for the industrial-scale bitcoin mining farms that dominate the Bitcoin network today.
The Pizza was penance
Hanyecz’s invention was so consequential that it earned him a virtual drop in from Satoshi Nakamoto himself. And it’s possible that the conversation that followed may have inspired Hanyecz’s famous Pizza Day purchase.
“A big attraction to new users is that anyone with a computer can generate some free coins,” Satoshi wrote to Hanyecz. “GPUs would prematurely limit the incentive to only those with high-end GPU hardware. It’s inevitable that GPU compute clusters will eventually hog all the generated coins, but I don’t want to hasten that day.”
In a 2019 interview for Bitcoin Magazine, Hanyecz told me that he “stopped advertising [GPU mining] after that.”
“I was like, ‘Man, I feel like I crapped up your project. Sorry, dude.’ He was concerned that some people might be discouraged because they can’t mine a block with a CPU,” Hanyecz said.
Perhaps this conversation spurred Hanyecz to offer 10,000 BTC for two large Papa John’s pizzas on that fateful day in May 15 years ago. In fact, he made the offer more than once. During the 2019 interview, Hanyecz told me that he spent nearly 100,000 BTC in the year that followed.
“I spent [all my bitcoin] on pizza long ago,” Hanyecz wrote in a February 2014 Bitcointalk post. “Other than a little bit of single digit change, I spent everything I mined. As you all know, the difficulty rises to adjust to hashing power, so eventually the mining wasn’t worth it for me.”
Looking at a Bitcoin address Hanyecz listed on his first Bitcointalk post, Hanyecz received and spent 81,432 BTC from this address from April to November 2010. This sum would be worth just over $8.6 billion today.
Laszlo Hanyecz’s wallet 2010 balance history | Source: Mempool.space
There’s no way to verify if Hanyecz spent all of this on pizza, other goods, or if he simply gave bitcoin away to new Bitcointalk members, a common practice back then when bitcoin was close-to worthless. But he did mention in his original thread for the pizza purchase that it was “an open offer,” although he reneged on this in August saying, “I can’t really afford to keep doing it since I can’t generate thousands of coins a day anymore. Thanks to everyone who bought me pizza already.”
The original purchase, let alone the recurring ones that apparently occurred after, would be enough to keep any sane person awake at night as bitcoin marches above $100,000. But in 2019 at least, Hanyecz stomached the ordeal with good humor. As he saw it, he committed culinary alchemy, transmuting his electricity and computing power into a cheap dinner. He had no idea that bitcoin would command the price it does today, so the transaction was a victory in his book.
“A trade happens because both parties think they’re getting a good deal,” he said. “I felt like I was beating the internet, getting free food. I was like, ‘Man, I got these GPUs linked together, now I’m going to mine twice as fast. I’m just going to be eating free food; I’ll never have to buy food again…”
“I mean, I coded this thing and mined bitcoin and I felt like I was winning the internet that day. I got pizza for contributing to an open-source project. Usually hobbies are a time sink and money sink, and in this case, my hobby bought me dinner.”
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