Knoxville Bitcoin Network will be hosting a Bitcoin Pizza Day Meetup on March 22, 2023. This idea came up in our group chat and the event will serve as a way to honor the legend of Bitcoin Pizza Day.
For those unfamiliar with Bitcoin Pizza Day, it’s the day the first Bitcoin transaction was made in exchange for another real-world item: pizza. On May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz paid someone 10,000 bitcoins to order two large Papa John’s pizzas. Yes, you read that right, 10,000 bitcoins.
As fellow Bitcoiners, we also hope to use this Sunday as a way to not only bring local Bitcoiners together to join us in eating delicious pizzas (which will be paid for in bitcoin), but also to wrap staff around. a local establishment. and operated a pizzeria in Knoxville, Tennessee. Continued bitcoin adoption is paramount, even if it’s one small pizza place owner at a time.
More than a decade has passed since the original Bitcoin Pizza Day, and for some people it is inconceivable even to spend 1 satoshi (the smallest unit of bitcoin) on anything lest the value of the satoshi fail. be much higher in the future. (These two pizzas from 2010 are now worth $302.6 million at the time of writing.) However, we believe that Hanyecz’s purchase of pizza with bitcoin is a vitally important part of Bitcoin’s history for several reasons: This purchase manifested the idea that we could have a monetary network in which goods and services could be purchased with bitcoin, while opening up a whole new set of ideas and possibilities for what bitcoin could achieve if enough people were starting to embrace it. With such cutting-edge use of an already nascent technology, Hanyecz — despite missing over $300 million in today’s play money — was crucial in enabling bitcoin’s further progression as an asset. money with measurable value in the real world. For that, we thank you.
If you zoom out, you’ll also start to realize that even spending $30,000 in bitcoins on a pizza isn’t worth it in 10 years, unless you replenish your satoshis after consumption. Twelve years ago, two pizzas cost 10,000 bitcoins; today, a large pizza worth $20 only costs you about 0.0006 bitcoin, or 60,000 satoshis. Quite a difference compared to 12 years ago! The question then becomes, how much does a pizza cost 12 years from today when priced in bitcoin? However, it’s important to spend your bitcoin just like you would use fiat currency, and with Lightning, that’s now more of a reality than ever. As a Bitcoiner, it is your responsibility to support anyone willing to accept bitcoin, and yes, that means spending it. The more user touchpoints a non-Bitcoiner has with a smooth UI, user experience, and instant settlement, the more this “Bitcoin thing” begins to make sense to them. The added value is real and the atmosphere has a palpable sense of excitement – that’s the magic of real-time bitcoin adoption. Hanyecz took a proverbial bullet for all of us, but in doing so allowed the maturation of the hardest money on Earth to continue. This Sunday, we pay tribute!
This is a guest post by Shane Kotz. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.