Pizza seller for 10,000 bitcoins. Bitcoin-Pizza is a pizza that has become famous all over the world. How to throw away millions

On May 22, the cryptocurrency community celebrates Bitcoin Pizza Day: it was on this day in 2010 that programmer Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. This purchase for virtual currency was the first in the real world. At the rate of 2019, the price of that pizza is about 80 million dollars.

On this day exactly nine years ago Laszlo Heinitz of Florida paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas that cost $25 at Papa John's. On May 18, he posted on a cryptocurrency forum asking him to sell him two large pizzas - “preferably some standard ones, without weird toppings like fish and the like.” In return, he offered bitcoins, which at that time cost about $40.

Laszlo recalls that he offered such a large amount in the hope that at least someone would respond. And such a person was found - he was 19-year-old Jeremy Sturdivant, who lived on the other side of the country.

Jeremy Stardivent

Back then, Jeremy had no idea that he was getting potential millions of dollars. Both parties were very pleased with the deal, which went down in history as the world's first Bitcoin purchase.

“I spent virtual money on food. Given that I was mining bitcoins myself, it was just a free pizza,” Heinitz recalls.

The same pizza from Papa John's, bought by Heinitz for 10 thousand bitcoins

Laszlo Heinitz went down in the history of the cryptocurrency world as “the same person who lost millions because of pizza”, but his sacrifice helped start the adoption of this virtual currency around the world. And now, on May 22, Bitcoin Pizza Day is celebrated all over the world.

Celebration at BTC.com

Now, 8 years later, Laszlo Heinitz says this about his 2010 purchase:

“I don't think it was a mistake. Thinking about it is like ranting about how good it would be to go back in time and buy Google stock.”

A Florida programmer was mining bitcoins for fun and spent them all on various trifles before a sharp jump in the cryptocurrency rate. But he does not regret the lost millions. In 2018, Laszlo again bought two large pizzas with bitcoin, but this time the order only cost him 0.00649 bitcoin ($67).

Laszlo Heinitz with his children

Stardivent was also not destined to become a millionaire: he spent the cryptocurrency received for pizza on a trip with a girl around the United States.

Today, the bitcoin rate is trading at around $8,000, according to Coinmarketcap at 20:30 Moscow time on May 21, 2019, the price of the coin is $7951.60, capitalization is $140.8 billion.

The deceptive ease of handling digital currency many times led to the loss of significant amounts. After all, these are just files on a computer, and users did not immediately learn to treat them with the necessary attention. But - this is the same money as cash rubles or dollars, so losing them is just as easy, and it is often not possible to restore them. Many of these cases quickly became popular and were widely dispersed within and outside the community.

People like to count other people's money, and their loss causes different emotions - from sympathy to gloating. Cryptocurrency can be lost not only due to hacking or fraud. Ignorance of the technical part, inattention, weak passwords, or simply a lack of faith in the prospects of digital currencies just as surely lead to losses. In this article, we have selected the most famous of these incidents, but you may not have heard of some of them.

The most expensive pizza in the world

The first historically recorded purchase of goods for bitcoins is for 10,000 BTC, at that time the equivalent of only $41. Czech enthusiast Lazlo Hanesh decided to show that Bitcoin is not so virtual, and ordered a couple of pizzas for a friend.

If he had waited until today, he would have received $2.3 million for his bitcoins. And at the peak of the price, 10,000 BTC were worth $12,420,000. Indeed, the most expensive pizza in history. Since then, Bitcoin enthusiasts have been celebrating trade day on May 22 with pizza. But on the other hand, Lazlo gained popularity on the network and his own page on the Bitcoin Wiki.

On the other hand, if not for this first purchase, who knows how much later bitcoins would have been used as money and how much the rise of cryptocurrencies and everything that followed would have been delayed. This article probably wouldn't exist either. Therefore, Hanesh has brought an undeniable benefit to cryptocurrencies and we cannot consider his act a mistake - this is a voluntary donation for development. Moreover, the bitcoins he spent were not his last.

How to throw away millions

But the most famous loss of Bitcoin, which went around all the news agencies of the world and was shown by many TV channels, came from an underestimation of the potential of cryptocurrency.

James Howels, a 28-year-old IT man from Newport, Wales, UK, was one of the first miners in the history of Bitcoin. He started mining on the processor of his home computer back in 2009. But, having mined 150 blocks, he was forced to stop this activity, as his girlfriend began to resent the noise and hot air that constantly emanated from a computer running around the clock. The price of bitcoin was then extremely low, and Howels soon forgot about his hobby. The next year the computer failed and most of the components, including the hard drive, were taken out and replaced. This disc sat in a drawer for three years, until the summer of 2013, when Howels decided to do a spring cleaning and threw the disc in the trash in the process.

It wasn't until November 22, 2013 that the unfortunate one finally looked at the Bitcoin price chart and was horrified. The 7,500 BTC he mined a few years ago would be worth around £4.2 million on this day, or $6.5 million! He called one of his friends and explained the situation, the two of them got into a truck and drove to the city dump. But looking at a field of several hectares, littered with mountains of garbage, they realized that the search could be delayed. One of the local workers said that it would take fifteen people with shovels and gas masks to have any chance of finding a disk that had been discarded a few months ago and was already lying a few feet below the surface. On this friends had to return home. Further searches turned up nothing. Now Howels can only dream of how he would dispose of the lost treasure.

Another Briton was let down not by a hard drive, but by a USB stick. A similar story happened to a programmer named David Kitchen. In 2010, he mined 50 bitcoins and stopped mining only because the noise of computer fans disturbed his sleep. He wrote down the key to bitcoins on a flash drive and safely forgot about it. When at the peak of the price 1 bitcoin was worth about 1000 pounds, David Kitchen remembered his wealth. Unfortunately, it turned out that he overwrote the flash drive with a Linux distribution.

To whom the network will send

A whole series of bitcoin losses occurred due to inattention. First, it is sending to the wrong address. In such a case, there is practically no chance of getting them back if the recipient does not have mercy and send the unexpectedly fallen money back. This is Reddit user TheDJFC. He accidentally transferred as many as 800 bitcoins (about $175,000) to one of the wallets. It all happened due to banal inattention. He had already used this address before and mistakenly selected the MtGox wallet in the address book.

But an even more stupid mistake is to enter the wrong amount in the "commission" field. On September 17, 2013, two curious transactions took place from the wallet, the owner of which remained unknown: the first in block #258546 , and two hours later, another transaction in block #258562 .
It would seem nothing significant, some 0.01 BTC ... and 80.98 BTC fees! Probably, the transactions were formed due to a software failure when testing some service. The first block was found by the BTC Guild pool, which commissions are paid to miners in part (from the PPLNS part). Therefore, the "gift" was scattered among several thousand miners. The second block went to an unknown pool or solo miner as it is the only block coming from the IP address. This is the real jackpot!

It is necessary to draw conclusions from such accidents. First, remember to be careful and verify your transactions. No one guarantees that the recipient of such a delicious gift will want to return it. And secondly, such an interesting mechanism can also be used in the future, for example, for organizing the Satoshi lottery. After all, such transactions are essentially the same as pouring a bag of money from a helicopter.

And another Reddit user clicked the wrong button, adding 38 bitcoins in fees to a 30 bitcoin transaction.

The biggest loss on the commission occurred on August 28, 2013. Then, for including one transaction in the block, the miner received 200 BTC! But, fortunately for the rotozee, this block found the ASICminer pool - the first manufacturer of ASIC miners. Its owner, known by the nickname Fried Cat, returned these 200 BTC to the sender. Such honesty is a rarity, not only in the cryptocurrency community!

And yet, you can simply forget the password to your bitcoins. Help this person, and he will transfer you a reward - 50 bitcoins out of those 384 that are stored and waiting in the wings on the owner's wallet. Just keep in mind that the password has more than 25 characters. Well, if the private key is lost, then bitcoins are also lost forever. One user only figured this out after losing 500 bitcoins.

The Bitcointalk forum even tried to collect statistics on the finally lost bitcoins. Various cases are described there - incorrect transactions, forgotten passwords, dead disks, formatting or reinstalling the OS, overwriting the file when updating the wallet, and much more. The biggest one-time loss there is considered to be 50,000 BTC lost by the current Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bitcoin Foundation - Brock Pierce, which he talks about in this video. But this story has not received publicity, there are certain doubts about its accuracy. As of September 1, 2014, the total loss was 134,578,278,646,59 BTC, after which the discussion died down. Now it is slightly less than 1% of all bitcoins mined. But most of the losses described there are not confirmed by anything, so this calculation can be considered very approximate.

Persuasive Letter

Usually, in order to get at least a thousand or two dollars, hackers have to stay up at night, look for vulnerabilities in the program code and risk their freedom.

But there is one that is so funny that it can't even be called a hack. This is an excellent example of the effectiveness of social engineering, which often works better than the most sophisticated techniques.

The Canadian Bitcoin servers were operated by the Rogers Data Center Company. At this time the company just moved from the previous hoster.

The hacker embezzled 149 BTC, which at that time was $100,000. He sent a message to the Rogers data center and asked for access to supposedly his servers. This turned out to be enough. The hacker, who pretended to be the director of Canadian Bitcoin, sent out just one message: "I'm James Grant." Without fantasizing and without inventing anything superfluous, he got the access he needed. "It's just ridiculous," the real James Grant told the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, which told us the story. The hacker's awareness suggests that he was most likely associated with one of these companies.

The card didn't work

Gambling for bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies is quite popular. Of course, where there is gambling, there are also losses. But not everyone plays out as badly as a young man named Bob. This math student didn't study probability very well. Otherwise, he would not have played so desperately.

Bob wrote that he originally bought Bitcoin as an investment. A friend introduced him to the Bitzino gambling site and blackjack. He played more and more, and by the morning of April 10, 2013, he had $500,000 in his account.

On the evening of the same day, he did not have a cent. In addition, he sent another $50,000 of his own money to Bitzino, which he intended to spend on his studies. Out of grief, he wrote several letters to the casino administration, they sympathized, but were not ready to help in any way. The situation is such that if Bob does not pay for the education, then he will have to return from the USA to England and part with his bride. Half a million dollars in bitcoins went to the income of the institution. And Mr. Bob wrote down this amount in the "losses" column.

Bob wrote on Reddit:

In no more than 60 seconds, I lost everything - my savings, my US visa, my job, my fiancée - and I was also $50,000 in debt.

To be honest, I didn't feel like I was in complete control of my actions. If it happened to me, it can happen to you too. And I sincerely hope that after reading my confession, this will never happen to you.

The subtleties of investing

Many people are attracted to exchange trading in cryptocurrencies. Especially when you don’t need to do anything, and the income drips by itself. Unfortunately, this does not happen. 3,000 investors, each holding a little over $12,000 on average, parted with their money in an instant.

The founders of the exchange simply transferred bitcoins to their accounts, packed their bags and were like that. They were not even stopped by the fact that in Chinese Hong Kong, where the MyCoin exchange was hosted, such things were punished by execution. The $390 million jackpot was overcome by fear. But users are also to blame for their own carelessness. Having learned more about this company, they could understand that this is not an exchange, but a financial pyramid that promised money and valuable prizes for attracting new users.

Not only losses

But sometimes lost bitcoins are found. Such a find brought a lot of joy to a student from Norway, whose name is Christopher Koch (Kristoffer Koch). In 2009, he wrote a thesis on cryptography. To illustrate it, Christopher bought 5,000 BTC, which cost him about $27.

After passing his thesis, Christopher, like most students, forgot about it. It was only in 2013 that he remembered his bitcoins. They already cost $885,000. Having cashed out a fifth of this amount, Christopher bought himself an apartment in the center of the Norwegian capital, Oslo.

The world of cryptocurrencies is rich in vicissitudes of fate. Some lose money, others find it. And there are usually more people who lose - as it happens in life. To minimize the risk of losing your digital currency, remember to follow the basic requirements with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

Laszlo Hanich is the man who made the world's first recorded bitcoin transaction in 2010 as payment for a physical item. Then for 10,000 bitcoins he bought two pizzas. Interestingly, Khanich has now bought two more pizzas using the Lightning Network.

On February 25, on the Lightning-dev mailing list, Hanich wrote that he had to "subcontract" with a friend in London who arranged for him to deliver pizza from a local establishment. A crypto enthusiast transferred funds to a friend via the Lightning Network, and he paid for the delivery with fiat money, since “software for pizza/Bitcoin atomic swaps does not exist yet.”

However, Hanich believes that he has demonstrated the possibility of using bitcoin for everyday transactions:

It could also be a pizzeria accepting payment through its own node.

Hanich paid for his first two pizzas with cryptocurrency on May 22, 2010, and since then this day has been celebrated as Bitcoin Pizza Day. Exist twitter account, which reports daily the cost of a "bitcoin pizza" as the equivalent of 10,000 bitcoins. For example, today its cost is $98,300,725.

This time, Hanich paid 649,000 satoshis, or 0.00649 bitcoins, or about $62. While receiving the pizza, he presented the driver with the first and last four characters of the hexadecimal string from the Lightning payment hash prototype.

Hanich positioned the pizza as a prize that could only be claimed if the Lightning Network transaction was successful. He wrote that if he had not been able to show the hash prototype to the driver, "the pizza would not have been passed and nothing would have happened."

The test was successful, and Hanich did not go hungry. However, he believes that "demonstrating a hash preimage is not good practice."

Hanich included in his post a link to photos of his family enjoying pizza. In the pictures, one of the children is wearing a T-shirt with the words "I love pizza", the other - "I love bitcoin". There is also a notebook on the table with the same numbers from the hash prototype.

The Lightning Network, a Layer 2 payment protocol, is considered the next step in the development of Bitcoin as it increases the bandwidth of the main network. The first recorded physical purchase on the Lightning Network took place on January 20 this year. Reddit user /u/btc_throwaway1337 reported that he bought a VPN router through the TorGuard payment channel, and it was a purchase comparable in importance to the first bitcoin pizzas.

Khanich in his message asks readers:

So does it make sense to do this instead of blockchain transactions? From what I've told you, I now think not. The goal was just to play around with LN and see something more than just moving a few Satoshis. Perhaps eventually pizzerias will have their own LN nodes and I will be able to directly open channels with them.

A post that he is not averse to ordering pizza for bitcoins (electronic currency bitcoin), or rather, 2 pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins - regular, with onions, sausages, mushrooms, tomatoes, but without any ridiculous things like a fish top, writes vc .ru.

According to this person, whose name is Laszlo (Laszlo), it would be "interesting" to pay for pizza with bitcoins. At that time, 10,000 bitcoins were equal to 40-50 dollars.

Some kind soul heeded his pleas and ordered a pizza in exchange for bitcoins. Here is the result:

Fast forward to our time - bitcoins have become a very popular and discussed phenomenon, and on November 19, 2013, an all-time high of $900 per coin was reached.

That is, the guy, without knowing it, ate pizza for 9 million dollars (well, or for 5 million at current prices, which, in principle, is also a little insulting).

bitcoin(from the English bit - a unit of information "bit", coin - "coin") - a peer-to-peer electronic payment system that uses the units of the same name for accounting. The Bitcoin website gives this description:

Open source P2P digital currency.
Bitcoin is a protocol and software that includes

Instant P2P transactions
Payments around the world
Low / zero transaction processing cost, etc.

Bitcoin operates without a central regulatory authority; transaction processing and emission are carried out collectively, by the efforts of the network.

The software is developed collectively as a free and open source project and distributed under the MIT license.

In the official reports of the World Bank, the ECB and the FBI - "virtual currency". According to the classification of the Financial Crime Commission (FinCEN) under the US Department of the Treasury, Bitcoin is classified as a "decentralized virtual currency". Bitcoin is often referred to as a "cryptocurrency".

The network is completely decentralized, has no central administrator or any equivalent.

Bitcoins can be used to pay for goods/services electronically from merchants willing to accept them. It is possible to exchange for ordinary money through specialized trading platforms or exchangers.

Story

The ideas of the "b-money" cryptocurrency were described in 1998 by Wei Dai in a cypherpunk mailing list. There were also Nick Szabo's proposals under the name "Bitgold".

In 2008, a file "Bitcoin: Peer-To-Peer Electronic Cash System" was published by a person or group of persons under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, describing the protocol and the principle of operation of a peer-to-peer network. According to Satoshi, development began in 2007. In 2009, he completed the development of the protocol and published the client, after which the network was launched.

Further development is organized and coordinated by Gavin Andresen.

The rules of the economy bitcoin

• The hard limit is approximately 21 million coins.
• Each bitcoin can be divided into parts, each minimum part is worth 0.00000001 bitcoin, the maximum total number of parts is 21×1014.
• Transactions are cheap and mostly free.

Statistics

• Huge computing power ensures the security of transactions: according to current estimates, 25 terahash/s.
• Over $1 million in daily turnover of 40,000 transactions.
• The total value of bitcoins in circulation exceeds $300 million.
• Just one major security bug (fixed August 2010).

Probably every cryptocurrency user knows the story of how an American in 2010 bought a pizza for 10,000 Bitcoins. Today, this person is called almost the biggest fool of the 21st century, because if he then refrained from such a purchase, he would have become a multimillionaire. Let's remember that significant day and find out how it influenced the future fate of the cryptocurrency world.

The first pizza bought with Bitcoin: how it was

An offer from Laszlo Heinitz to buy pizza for Bitcoins

On May 18, 2010, an American with the nickname Laszlo wrote an appeal on one of the popular Bitcoin forums. He offered 10,000 BTC to anyone who orders or cooks and delivers 2 pizzas to him in Jacksonville, Florida. Laszlo said that there are no special requirements for pizza - he is just interested in getting food for Bitcoins. In addition, the user shared his taste preferences, writing that he likes mushrooms, sausage, tomatoes, cheese and onions in pizza, without any fish. Someone laughed at this proposal, someone offered to sell Bitcoins on the exchange for $41 and order food, someone wanted to participate in the deal, but was in Europe.

On May 21, no one has yet responded to Laszlo's proposal, so he asked again in the discussion whether there were any users interested in such a transaction and whether they consider the cost of 10,000 BTC to be too low. Oddly enough, but one of the users agreed to the conditions put forward. He paid for the delivery of his money, and in return received the declared number of coins.

The price of a pizza purchased by Bitcoin in 2010 was approximately $20. In total, someone paid $40 for 2 pizzas including delivery. The deal was fair, as in May 2010, 10,000 Bitcoins matched the amount spent at the rate.

This day became historic, because for the first time it was possible to purchase a real product for cryptocurrency. By the way, this event is sometimes interpreted by people not quite accurately. Some believe that it was the pizzeria that accepted the Bitcoins from Laszlo Heinitz, but this is not so. The coins were received by an ordinary person who acted as an intermediary. But even despite this, May 22, 2010 can be considered a revolutionary day, because crypto money was applied in a new area for itself.

By the way, Laszlo himself did not want to stop at one deal. He was willing to continue paying Bitcoins to people who would order food for him, as he announced in a new post on June 12th. Laszlo also revealed that his 1-year-old daughter loves to smear pizza on her face.

On August 4, after the July rise in the Bitcoin rate, they wrote on the forum that 10,000 coins are already worth $600 and asked if the offer was still valid? Laszlo, of course, refused, arguing that he did not expect such popularity and could not afford to continue such purchases, since it was no longer possible to mine a thousand coins a day. By the way, in November 2010 for 10 thousand BTC you could get 2600 dollars.

What happened next, we all know well. Over the next 7 years, Bitcoin has risen in price many times over, and the people who stored it in large quantities became millionaires. Because of this, the revolutionary purchase is to this day called one of the biggest stupidities of the 21st century.

What happened to the American who bought pizza with Bitcoin?

Today, almost everyone who learns about the pizza story is wondering if this "lucky man" committed suicide. Such negative assumptions are quite justified, because not everyone can cope with the idea that he missed the opportunity to get rich.

The New York Times journalists managed to talk to him back in 2013. As it turned out, after his famous purchase, Laszlo eventually lost interest in cryptocurrency. At the beginning of 2013, he sold all the accumulated coins at the rate of $1. Its revenue was approximately 4,000 USD. That was enough to buy a computer and several video cards. Hanyecz said that such costs are due to professional activities (he works as a programmer), and not the desire to build a farm. Laszlo also added that he is no longer engaged in mining.

As for the bitcoin pizza, according to Hanyetz, the purchase was made in order to become the first person to be able to purchase a real product with cryptocurrency. Moreover, the American did not believe in the prospects of digital coins, which is why he parted with them so easily.

In the spring of 2017, when the cost of BTC was fixed above the $1,000 mark, Reddit users tried to find the famous American, but the searches did not yield any results. The last time he visited the forum was in November 2017. In May 2018, the editors of Cointelegraph interviewed Laszlo Hanjec and the second party to the transaction, who sold the pizza for Bitcoins. His name is Jeremy Sturdiant (nickname Jercos). He said that he spent the proceeds of the coins on the trip, when they cost several hundred dollars.

Pizza for 10,000 Bitcoins - the impact on the cryptocurrency world

Based on the example of Laszlo Haniec, we can come to two conclusions:

1. Whatever you buy or sell for cryptocurrency, you will regret it anyway (the next day, a month or a year later). Of course, the Bitcoin exchange rate is extremely volatile - it periodically rises and then falls. In any case, this digital asset has a great future. According to many experts, Bitcoin can overcome the barrier of $100,000 per coin in the next few years. And this leads to the second conclusion.
2. It is better to accumulate coins in all possible ways: through mining, making purchases on exchanges or collecting Satoshi on faucets. And if you want to make some kind of transaction, then it is better to simply exchange BTC for fiat money.

Generally speaking, the day when an American bought a pizza with Bitcoins became a kind of holiday for members of the cryptocurrency community. Every year on May 22, promotions are held in many pizzerias, where they offer discounts for paying in Bitcoins. In addition, many people make comparisons - how many bitcoins a pizza was bought in 2010 and how much it costs now.

We also decided to make such a comparison. At the time of this writing (06/22/2018), the Bitcoin exchange rate is 6,177 USD per coin. Thus, today 2 pizzas cost approximately 61.7 million dollars. Ironically, they can be called the most expensive fast food in history.

Of course, Laszlo Hanjec lost his chance to become a millionaire, but he does not regret it, like, for example, the Welshman James Howells. In 2013, he accidentally threw out a hard drive on which 7.5 thousand Bitcoins were stored. If we take into account today's exchange rate, then about 46 million dollars lie in the landfill. Yes, the amount lost is less, but the American parted with Bitcoins deliberately, and the Welsh lost them out of stupidity.

In any case, the example of these two people teaches you that you need to be careful about your cryptocurrency savings so that in the future you do not add to the list of failed millionaires.