Legends of Bitcoin: Laszlo Hanyecz
Bitcoin’s Pizza Day And Why It Matters
The Bitcoin community has been unfair to Laszlo Hanyecz and ignorant of his service to Bitcoin.
Everyone has heard of Bitcoin Pizza Day and “that guy” that bought two Papa John’s pizzas with 10,000 BTC.
Reporters will usually calculate the millions this much BTC is worth today and mock the “pizza guy” for buying the most expensive pizza in the world.
Does Laszlo deserve to be mocked, or was he a visionary in the field that laid the foundations for the first cryptocurrency to succeed?
Laszlo Hanyecz deserves more recognition for his work on Bitcoin, and the Bitcoin community should attribute him for the importance and merit he deserves.
A Legendary Bitcoin Developer
Laszlo Hanyecz invented GPU mining, but all he got in return was a sh** pizza meme — Bitcoin Magazine (source)
Many in the crypto field often call him the “pizza guy” and mention how he mistakenly used his thousands of mined Bitcoins as digital money to buy pizzas and other items.
Sadly, the “HODL” mentality gained acceptance and ground in 2014, and Bitcoin from a P2P electronic cash system, as the whitepaper suggests, became an asset that whales kept accumulating and distributing during periods of extreme parabolic growth.
Most in BTC are in it for the price. Few in this community care about the whitepaper and the concept of P2P electronic cash.
Most of the early miners, devs, and investors have long abandoned Bitcoin as they never thought of Bitcoin under Blockstream’s governance as being able to achieve the adoption targets it had as digital money.
Nowadays, BTC is not about the revolutionary potential that allowed it to gain acceptance and recognition during its early years.
Laszlo’s Contribution
Laszlo Hanyecz contributed to Bitcoin with his code.
He was the first Bitcoin developer to release the Bitcoin code for Mac OS:
Moreover, he was the first programmer to script GPU mining code for Bitcoin, which he successfully tested and managed to mine with a higher hashrate. He informed Satoshi Nakamoto and the Bitcoin community of his findings, although Satoshi was already ahead of Laszlo, having already knowledge of GPU mining and possibly using it to avert 51% attacks.
Laszlo never regretted spending Bitcoins, unlike what newcomers might think.
Bitcoin was supposed to become money for the world, and he was the first to use it as such before the herd followed. Bitcoin those days had no value with no exchange offering BTC trades to fiat.
Laszlo did use Bitcoin as it was supposed to, and he is a Bitcoin Legend, one that we need to remember for everything he did to help Bitcoin succeed in the early days.
He was the first Bitcoin spender, and more followed. Bitcoin, until 2013, was growing as a digital currency, but later abandoned the payment properties, when Blockstream devs decided no further development on-chain scaling was needed, but secondary networks (layer-2) solutions like LN and Liquid.
Laszlo’s contribution to the development and promotion of Bitcoin in the early days is not presented in the media as much as the fact of the first-ever purchase made with Bitcoin.
This event is a historic one for Bitcoin. Sadly, the BTC community doesn’t praise Laszlo for his commitment and efforts to promote the use case of Bitcoin so early. Many people in the BTC community believe that making purchases with Bitcoin is unwise because they anticipate the cryptocurrency’s value to increase in the future.
However, we should note that when Laszlo bought two pizzas using Bitcoin, Bitcoin was not even traded on an exchange. He gave a price to Bitcoin.
In Conclusion
Laszlo never regretted spending his Bitcoin since this was the ultimate purpose. Bitcoin was created to become a digital currency revolution. A P2P electronic cash network of payments.
The argument that this pizza today costs millions is a misconception since Bitcoin was used just by a couple of dozens of people. Nobody could have predicted that the price of Bitcoin would reach tens of thousands of dollars at least for a couple of years more.
The price of Bitcoin dropped down to zero in exchanges several times during the first years.
At a time when no one knew what exactly Bitcoin was going to be, Laszlo gave Bitcoin the ultimate proof it could be used as money.
This is how we should pay our respects to the legendary Bitcoin developer Laszlo Hanyecz.
References:
- Inside Bitcoins: Laszlo Hanyecz Claims Satoshi Invented GPU Mining To Prevent 51% Attacks
- Bitcoin Magazine: THE MAN BEHIND BITCOIN PIZZA DAY IS MORE THAN A MEME: HE’S A MINING PIONEER
- Bitcointalk: laszlo (profile)
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Originally published at https://read.cash.
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