#Money and time sink free

Some of you may have known of this story already from this 60 Minutes episode, or from any of the many articles that mainstream and crypto media alike churn out at this time of year. If you visit Hanyecz’s Bitcointalk post, for instance, you’ll see that it has been spun into a 70+ page lexicon of exclamations and reactions to the legendary pizza transaction’s rising price over the years. This story, of course, has become a bedrock of the Bitcoin community’s lore. The 100,000 bitcoin Hanyecz spent on pizza in 2010 is worth $900,000,000 at the time of publication and was worth $2,000,000,000 at Bitcoin’s all time high. The answer, of course, is yes-multiple times over. Not six months later, one precocious Bitcointalk user on the same thread would ask, “Will this eventually become the world's first million-dollar pizza?” It wouldn’t take long before Laszlo’s decision would become a point of great intrigue within the Bitcoin community. He has to stop in August, though, because the network was getting more popular so he couldn’t “generate thousands of coins a day anymore,” according to a post in the original pizza thread. While the first transaction was completed on May 22, Hanyecz would go on to do it 9 or so more times and spend a total of 100,000 bitcoin on pizza that summer.

#Money and time sink free

I’m just going to be eating free food I’ll never have to buy food again.’” “I was like, ‘Man, I got these GPUs linked together, now I’m going to mine twice as fast. Usually hobbies are a time sink and money sink, and in this case, my hobby bought me dinner.” I got pizza for contributing to an open-source project. “I mean, I coded this thing and mined bitcoin and I felt like I was winning the internet that day. “I wanted to do the pizza thing because to me it was free pizza,” Hanyecz explained.

In his mind, this wasn’t paying for anything this was a free lunch. After all, this was the dude who invented GPU mining he was eating a meal he paid for with internet currency he generated by idling his home desktop. One user cautioned, perhaps a bit poignantly in hindsight, that 10,000 bitcoin “is quite a lot,” or around $41 on one of Bitcoin’s first (and now defunct) trading hubs.Īs Hanyecz told me a year ago over the phone, the price on some trading forum made little difference to him.