Good Morning Bitcoins
I’m Mad Bitcoins
and this is... The True Story behind Bitcoin Pizza Day
Bitcoin pizza day is not just another day for promoting bitcoin, eating pizza or promoting your cleverly cloaked altcoin pretending to be bitcoin. Satoshi was much smarter than that. Satoshi left behind lessons.
Have you ever asked yourself? How did Laszlo Hanecz, the buyer of the Bitcoin Pizza actually get all those bitcoins that he spent that fateful May 22nd, 2010?
It turns out, according to Nathaniel Popper and his new book Digital Gold (sounds like a real winner, buy it now on Amazon or Overstock.com) that Laszlo was one of the very first to mine Bitcoin with his GPU, allowing him to receive hundreds of bitcoins a day. Unsure if what he was doing was right, Laszlo emailed Satoshi and told him of his plans to mine with his GPU.
Satoshi’s response was mixed:
A big attraction to new users -- Satoshi said -- is that anyone with a computer can generate some free coins. When there are 5000 users, that incentive may fade, but for now it's still true.
GPUs would prematurely limit the incentive to only those with high end GPU hardware. It's inevitable that GPU clusters will eventually hog all the generated coins, but I don't want to hasten that day. If the difficulty gets really high, that increases the value of each coin since the supply becomes more limited. The supply is the same: 50 coins every 10 minutes.
But GPUs are much less evenly distributed, so the generated coins only go towards rewarding 20% of the people for joining the network instead of 100%.
I don't mean to sound like a socialist, I don't care if wealth is concentrated, but for now, we get more growth by giving that money to 100% of the people than giving it to 20%. Also, the longer we can delay the GPU arms race, the more mature the OpenCL libraries get, and the more people will have OpenCL compatible video cards. If we see from the difficulty factor that someone is using too much GPU, we can certainly pick this OpenCL stuff up again.
Maybe my effort to maintain GPU innocence is running out of time. It's worked out so far.
-- Satoshi Nakamoto
Thanks to Laszlo, Nathaniel and his new book Digital Gold for sharing this piece of Bitcoin history.
Now go out there and enjoy your Bitcoin Pizza Day!
Remember to always hold your private keys
and if you can’t tell what the product is,
the product is probably you.