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Today is Bitcoin Pizza Day, a holiday enshrined in Bitcoin’s annals as the day that Bitcoin developer Laszlo Hanyecz spent 10,000 BTC for two large Papa John’s pizzas in 2010. Historic as it is, this feat — or blunder, depending on who you ask — towers over Hanyecz’s much more important contributions to Bitcoin in its nascency — one of which indelibly altered the course of bitcoin mining.

Plus, prices, mining headlines, Chart of the Week and more!

It’s about a 5 minute read. But before we dig in…

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What you didn’t know about Laszlo Hanyecz, the Bitcoin Pizza Day Legend

When Laszlo Hanyecz purchased two large Papa John’s pizzas with 10,000 BTC on May 22, 2010, he became a legend – but he didn’t know it at the time. 

The skalds of Bitcoin Twitter have sung of the historic moment, the “first real world purchase” with bitcoin, and pundits have etched the story into the internet’s immortal memory with headlines about the infamous Bitcoin Pizza Purchase, now dearly valued at more than $1 billion.

But what if I told you that Laszlo spent many times more – nearly 10 times more – bitcoin following the historic purchase? And what if I told you that perhaps Hanyecz did so in ostensible penance for his much more consequential contribution to Bitcoin in its uncertain infancy?

Beyond Pizza Day, Laszlo Hanyecz was a Bitcoin technical pioneer

The penumbra of Hanyecz’s Pizza Day purchase has overshadowed his two seminal contributions to Bitcoin’s early technical development. 

The first of these came on April 19, 2010, just days after Hanyecz registered for Bitcointalk, a forum established by Satoshi Nakamoto that was (and still is) a watering hole for techie Bitcoin’s intelligentsia. Hanyecz created the first MacOS client for Bitcoin Core, the original and still-dominant software implementation for the nodes that underpin the Bitcoin network.

Satoshi originally coded Bitcoin for Windows and Linux, but Hanyecz’s innovation enabled MacOS devices to run the software too. His contribution laid the foundation for all MacOS-enabled bitcoin wallets and applications that would follow it. 

But arguably greater than this was Hanyecz’s discovery that he could mine bitcoin with his computer’s graphics card (GPU). Until this point, early adopters used their computer processing units (CPUs) to mine bitcoin, and since the GPUs were orders of magnitude more powerful than CPUs for the task, this innovation propelled bitcoin mining forward much faster than Satoshi expected. 

“Updated Mac OS X binary…It will use your GPU to generate bitcoins.  This works really well if you have a good GPU like an NVIDIA 8800 or something like that,” Hanyecz wrote in a May 10, 2010 Bitcointalk post. 

The discovery ignited Bitcoin’s first digital gold rush. Bitcoin’s total hashrate exploded upward by 130000% by the end of the year, and for the first time, bitcoin miners began constructing small-scale mining farms. These setups – slapped together in basements and attics, garages and sheds – were the prototypes for the industrial-scale bitcoin mining farms that dominate the Bitcoin network today. 

Pizza for Penance?

Hanyecz’s invention was so consequential that it earned him a virtual drop in from Satoshi Nakamoto himself. And it’s possible that the conversation that followed may have inspired Hanyecz’s famous Pizza Day purchase. 

“A big attraction to new users is that anyone with a computer can generate some free coins,” Satoshi wrote to Hanyecz. “GPUs would prematurely limit the incentive to only those with high-end GPU hardware. It’s inevitable that GPU compute clusters will eventually hog all the generated coins, but I don’t want to hasten that day.”

In a 2019 interview for Bitcoin Magazine, Hanyecz told me that he “stopped advertising [GPU mining] after that.”

“I was like, ‘Man, I feel like I crapped up your project. Sorry, dude.’ He was concerned that some people might be discouraged because they can’t mine a block with a CPU,” Hanyecz said. 

Perhaps this conversation spurred Hanyecz to offer 10,000 BTC for two large Papa John’s pizzas on that fateful day in May 15 years ago. In fact, he made the offer more than once. During the 2019 interview, Hanyecz told me that he spent nearly 100,000 BTC in the year that followed.

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Bitcoin Mining Headlines

Cango to complete second half of turnkey Antminers by July

Cango expects to complete a second purchasing option with Bitmain for 18 EH/s of turnkey Antminers by July. The company emerged almost overnight in November when it announced the completion of the first purchase option for 32 EH/s, making it one of the largest public miners in terms of hashrate.

Nebraska bill that could be a blow to bitcoin miners lands on Governor’s desk

Nebraska Legislative Bill 526 passed unanimously on May 14 and is waiting on a signature from Governor Jim Pillen to become law. The infrastructure bill includes a provision that would yoke miners with the responsibility of bankrolling grid infrastructure improvements, although an excise tax of $0.025/kWh was axed from the final version. MARA, which operates 100 MW in the state, pushed back against the bill and said it would cease any expansion in the state once it is codified in law.

Parasite Pool launches with “plebs eat first” payout model

A new bitcoin mining pool has entered the ranks, bootstrapped by ZK, the mind that launched the Ordinal Maxi Biz ordinal collection among others. Parasite Pool is courting pleb and retail miners with a novel payout method whereby the miner who finds a block earns 1 BTC, while the pool distributes the remaining block rewards to other miners. The pool is still in the beta stage and currently has ~5 PH/s pointed to it.

Auradine launches standalone ASIC chip product

Fledgling ASIC manufacturer Auradine is rolling out a new standalone ASIC chip line. The company will now offer clients the ability to order ASIC bitcoin mining chips “for customized for factors” in addition to its line of fully-assembled ASIC bitcoin miners.

Synteq Digital purchases New Hampshire Warehouse following HPC acquisition

Bitcoin mining services and HPC provider Synteq Digital has acquired a 30,000 sq/ft warehouse in New Hampshire to offer“in-house services for hardware parts testing, cleaning, consolidation, and quality assurance.” The acquisition follows closely on the heels of Synteq’s purchase of HPC infrastructure and services firm Crunchbits LLC.

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