Top five things you didn't know about Bitcoin. We are counting down the five facts that you haven't heard about the biggest blockchain.
Bitcoin Season two is brought to you by Arch Network, the protocol building bridgeless apps on Bitcoin. More on Arch later on in the show. Let's kick it off. [upbeat music] Okay, we're back.
Uh, welcome back to Bitcoin Season two. This is Charlie and Colin. We are the co-writers, the screenwriters of Bitcoin Season two. We tell you what's gonna happen before it happens.
Uh, Colin, uh, what are you excited to talk about today? Well, in this case, we're gonna be talking about the things that have already happened,
and let you know about the things that maybe you didn't know that happened with Bitcoin's early history.
There are a lot of little Easter eggs hidden throughout the annals of Bitcoin, and we're gonna be unpacking some of those today. Some of them you have already heard of, no doubt.
Some of them you may think you know the full story on, but I guarantee you there's more hiding behind the pages.
So the ones that I'm most excited about are, at least the two I will be presenting on, our boy, Laszlo Hanyecz, widely known infamously as Bitcoin pizza guy, actually did a crap ton for Bitcoin in the early days and was kind of the forefather of professional mining in a way, which we'll get into in a little bit.
Also, I'm really excited about these unknown hard forks and inflation bugs that if they had occurred today, would probably absolutely nuke Tradfi and Boomer confidence in Bitcoin as an asset class, so. Yeah.
So we're gonna, we're gonna talk about those. So Boomers, if you're listening, cover your ears. This is, uh, for children only. It's like the opposite of, uh, a disclaimer, um.
[chuckles] Uh- No adult supervision required. Exactly, yeah. This is a, this is a safe space. Exactly.
It's a safe space for you to mourn the fact that you invested in a meme asset because your son-in-law ended up making more money than you year over year when you were just dollar cost averaging into the S&P, so. Yeah.
So, uh, let's get into it. Let's, let's do-- We're gonna do this chronologically. Uh, and the first of the top five things you didn't know about Bitcoin goes back to before Bitcoin even began.
When Satoshi Nakamoto and others were working on the Bitcoin code base, they were building what we call the Bitcoin client, like the first client that Sato-- that ran Bitcoin.
And this client included not just, uh, the Bitcoin code, but it included a poker client.
Yes, Satoshi originally imagined that you might want to play poker and gamble with your bitcoins.
So what it actually was, was like a command line, like text-based program within the Bitcoin client that you'd run on your computer
and, uh, you could, uh, play poker and wager bitcoins within this client.
Um, this is I think comes as a surprise to a lot of people, not to a lot of OGs that like, this is a common thing in the Bit-Bitcoin technical community.
So like, well, you know, the original client include poker, but, um, I don't think this is like as well known, um, uh, in normal circles.
And, uh, so what happened was this client, uh, uh, when Satoshi was working on the code in, uh, two thousand and eight,
uh, they were updating it, uh, you know, making sure Bitcoin was ready to launch, uh, as it, as they did in early two thousand and nine.
But, um, the poker client was taken out of the launch, uh, of the Bitcoin client that made it to launch.
Um, I think it's, it might be obvious why Satoshi took it out 'cause it doesn't really, uh, it doesn't really fully vibe with, uh, like the Bitcoin we, we know and love today.
But, uh, this is an interesting, uh, little insight. Colin, what are your-- what's your thoughts? What are your take on this? I-- Th-this is news to me. I had no idea that this was actually a thing.
Maybe it was just, you know, in the dustbin of my mind. But I'm, I've got the original code base pulled up here, and in line six you can see C plus plus code generated with Xform builder. Uh, this is
not native to Bitcoin, what the C plus plus code is discussing. And then if we go down to, I believe it's line, yep, fifteen ninety-two, you can see C poker lobby dialogue base.
This is on video for those who are listening on audio. And this is a code for the actual poker client that Charlie is referencing. The-- My only take with this is that
somehow, and, and, and it is now, you know, kind of established in Bitcoin lore with this being included in the original client before Satoshi scrubbed it when he first released Bitcoin, that poker and Bitcoin are intrinsically linked, almost fated.
I mean, this is like, you know, in vitro Bitcoin and poker were destined to be together.
And for those of you who may not know, a lot of poker players or a lot of early Bitcoin adopters were online poker players because in the early days of Bitcoin,
it was used and still is used as a means of payment and settlement for online poker.
Now, this probably has to deal with-- for-- Th-that's probably the case for a number of reasons, whether it's that, you know, payment platforms and the like just didn't wanna service poker clients, uh, maybe it's easier for international settlement.
But, you know, degeneracy runs hand in hand, I guess, with both the Bitcoin ecosystem and with poker players.
And if you ever wonder why you see so manyYou know, prominent Bitcoiners or other people at conferences being poker sharks, this is partly why. Because- Yeah...
it's, it's been used for a long time as a settlement means on these poker sites. Yeah, and it's a really interesting topic because, uh, y- there's a few, there's a few conversations which emerge out of this. Um,
one, it is kind of in- interesting from a historical context that you saw Bitcoin being used as the means of settlement, um, for the poker boom, the online gambling boom of the late two thou- late 2000s, early 2010s, before that was like really kind of clamped down on by a lot of, uh, payment providers and, and ISPs.
Um, but then also, uh, you see, uh, this topic of like, how do you bootstrap a network like Bitcoin for users?
Um, I again often make this analogy to ordinals where, um, the way ordinals came about, uh, you had a similar all-in-one client that Casey Rodarmor built that inscribed, that also displayed, that lets you run a whole server.
Um, it wasn't simply just allowing you to track Satoshis, it was delivering the entire kind of user experience, both the idea and the product.
And so it's interesting that you see Satoshi include a, a poker client because, um, maybe the thought was to, on day one, already give like a thing to do, uh, with these new tokens.
And if you, uh, you know, I, if you bring up like the, the path of the adoption of money, like money goes through phases where it has to kind of be used for something incrementally getting bigger and more serious over time and, um, you do with all new systems have a user bootstrapping challenge.
So poker, um, could have been that mechanism. And then the other one is, which I bring up, which is, uh,
the I, I push back against this idea that Bitcoin is this pure, morally righteous blockchain, um, because Satoshi themselves included something which was, uh, inherently speculative gambling and not really like, um, pearly white as, uh, I think many, uh, Bitcoiners try to, try to frame Bitcoin as.
A- and to build on what you're saying about bootstrapping a new monetary system like Bitcoin with early use cases, the use case that really skyrocketed Bitcoin's value and put it into the fore of public conversation, as we've covered on Bitcoin season two in Writer's Room in the past, is the Silk Road, right?
So the two primary use cases for Bitcoin in the early days were online gambling and buying drugs. Is it any wonder that it took us this long to get an ETF? I mean [both laughing] you know.
Yeah, well, the again, boomers turn, you know, boomers cover your ears. This is just for the young kids. Uh, Bitcoin apparently was used for a lot of speculation.
One might say that the boomers are still using it for speculation, but on a longer timeline. Aren't we all? And the number two thing that you didn't know about Bitcoin is about Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment.
So for those of you who are not familiar with mining, Bitcoin, uh, in order to balance the, uh, average block time, changes how hard it is to mine a block.
We call this the difficulty adjustment, and it hits about every two weeks. In fact, it's programmed to hit or, uh, the w-- uh, it says that it's programmed to be every two thousand and sixteen blocks.
If you were to put this in human terms, it would on average be about every two weeks. However, due to a what's called an off-by-one error in Bitcoin that Satoshi made, um,
the difficulty adjustment, while it's said to be every two thousand sixteen blocks, in reality, it's programmed to be every two thousand fifteen blocks, um, which is kind of a hilarious like error and, um, you would ask maybe it's, maybe it's an error, maybe it's a documentation error or an implementation error.
The funny thing is, is that even all the like the Bitcoiners and the miners still reference, um, the difficulty being every two thousand sixteen blocks, but [chuckles] in reality, Bitcoin nodes calculate it being, uh, every two thousand and fifteen blocks.
Y- yeah, and I think that's the important distinction 'cause it is every two thousand sixteen blocks, but the actual calculation for what difficulty should be over that period is two thousand and fifteen blocks.
So that one last block at the end of every difficulty cycle, whatever's going on with, uh, the timing of that block, how quickly it was mined, that's not thrown into the calculation for how difficulty should adjust.
And as Charlie said, this was an error by Satoshi. It's technically a bug. Fixing it would require a hard fork,
not the biggest priority, not gonna break Bitcoin, not even that annoying, and honestly it's would definitely within the margin of error, like how much would that actually affect the difficulty recalculation, it would be a fraction of a fraction of a percent.
Yeah, I don't think anybody actually cares. Nobody really cares that it's every two thousand fifteen blocks. It's negligible.
Um, I think it just goes to show that, uh, when Sa- that while Satoshi may have come up at a high level with the perfect system, when they actually went to write the code, they did make a human error, such as an off-by-one error, which, uh- Yeah, and we're kinda stuck with today...
Satoshi is but a man or a woman, um, not a god, definitely not infallible.
And could you imagine going back to no one cares trying to explain this to like some dude at BlackRock or at a TradFi fund, just like eyes glazing over, thinking about- [laughs]...
you know, the club he's gonna go to that night or like the millions of dollars that he has on, on the table for a deal or something like that.He's like, "I don't care about the, I don't care about the difficulty adjustments," uh- Okay.
Yeah, and a good reminder, Satoshi is but a man or a woman, um, not a god, definitely not infallible.
And could you imagine going back to no one cares, trying to explain this to, like, some dude at BlackRock or at a Trad Fi fund?
[laughs] Just, like, eyes glazing over, thinking about, you know, the club he's gonna go to that night or, like, the millions of dollars- [laughs]... that he has on, on the table for a deal or something like that.
He's like, "I don't care about the, I don't care about the difficulty adjustments." Uh, you know, um, the US, uh, the, the Saudis are buying, uh, five trillion dollars of Bitcoin through BlackRock today.
[laughs] And I'm like, [laughs] okay, you're, you're allowed to not care about the difficulty adjustment being twenty fifteen instead of twenty sixteen.
But, but you should know, someone, someone over there at BlackRock should at least know about it. One hundred percent, and a few other bugs in Bitcoin's code that we'll cover in a little bit.
Yeah, that's not the other thing. Um, I think, uh, for number three, it's one of my favorite ones because it's spicy. Um, so number three of the top five things you didn't know about Bitcoin is that Bitcoin's
twenty-one million supply is not mentioned in the whitepaper. Yes, you heard that correct. Bitcoin having a supply of twenty-one million is not mentioned in the whitepaper.
In fact, even further than that, there is not mention of Bitcoin having any finite supply whatsoever in the whitepaper. This might sound kind of crazy because you say, you ask, isn't that core to what Bitcoin is?
Um, and I will...
Um, you know, maybe I'll be crucified for even bringing this up, but I think it's important to know that, um, the way we came about with twenty-one million is that Satoshi, in the implementation of the first Bitcoin client, set an absolute value of twenty-one million.
This has been the subject of a lot of conversation, and I believe that Bitcoin's finite supply and twenty-one million number have been, uh, uh, are core to what Bitcoin is.
But it goes to show that I think, you know, the whitepaper is one thing, and then Bitcoin the network has evolved or, or become something which isn't necessarily perfectly, uh, aligned with the whitepaper.
You heard it here, folks. One of the Bitcoin maximalists' most cherished shibboleths, the twenty-one million supply cap, is never mentioned in the seminal document for the network that they so fervently cling to.
I think that you nailed it though about the whitepaper and the actual network being two completely separate things. Obviously they are. The whitepaper is more of a loose mission statement in a way.
And Satoshi released it on October thirty-first in twenty-eightee- uh, two thousand eight, excuse me, right? And then the network didn't go live until January- Yeah, January ninth.
The January ninth, yeah, in two thousand nine. So he was still probably hammering out the details at the time that he published that whitepaper.
He probably had most of the code for the core functions in place, like difficulty adjustment, all that kind of stuff, but he didn't conceivably decide on the actual hard cap until later.
Maybe he had it already at the time, but that's another interesting point.
When people try to do all of this divining and, you know, call upon numerology for trying to figure out why Satoshi picked twenty-one million, he said in a Bitcoin talk forum back in the day that he just kinda decided on the number and that there was no,
you know, calculation or consideration that drove him to that. [laughs] Almost like it came to him in a dream or something, and he just decided twenty-one million would be it. But that's- It mapped out nicely to...
I mean, it maps out nicely to, like, the supply schedule of, you know, difficulty adjustment every two weeks and halving every four years.
Like, it maps pretty well onto that given, you know, a certain number of subunits you can divide by. One hundred percent, and that's another interesting tidbit too.
The supply is actually technically not twenty-one million. [laughs] Yeah, that's the other thing. It's like twenty point nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine something else, right? Yeah.
It's like- This is a bonus. This is, uh, uh, item three point five that you didn't know about what Bitcoin is. Yeah, so a lot of the sacred cows being slaughtered today in Ryder's Room. We're getting our hands bloodied.
Yeah.
[laughs] Um, it, but it's really interesting 'cause I think, um, I actually think it improves people's understanding of Bitcoin because, uh, I would say that it is absolutely core to what Bitcoin is, that it has this finite supply.
To violate that brings into question whether Bitcoin is valuable, um, to me at least.
But, uh, it's not in the whitepaper, and so I, I think this is a point that is lost or, um, it also reveals how many people actually have read the foundational documents of Bitcoin.
'Cause I bet you a lot of people have listened to a thousand hours of podcasts about Hard Money and kind of skimmed over the first two paragraphs in the whitepaper but not read the full daunting eight pages of m- what is mostly kind of technical and maths content in the whitepaper.
Do your duty to the empire, pleb. Read the whitepaper today. Read it every day. [laughs] Memorize it. Right. Be able to recite it backwards. It's like you gotta say, say your Hail Marys, you know?
[laughs] You gotta say your 20-something Hail, twenty-one Hail Mar- twenty-one Marys. Twenty-one Hail Marys and- Yeah. Twenty-one Hail Marys. Twenty-one whitepapers and, uh, two thousand sixteen All Fathers. Exa-exactly.
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So we're talking about bugs.
This is a good transition into our fourth What You Didn't Know About Bitcoin, which is really four, four point one, and four point two, because we're going to be talking about three bugs that were introduced to Bitcoin,
uh, two in the early days and one, I would say, in the later days in two thousand and eighteen. The first of which is probably maybe the most well known, um, but maybe not,
and that is the two thousand and ten inflation bug.
On August fifteenth, twenty ten, I'm reading from, uh, the Bitcoin wiki about that value overflow incident, incident, it was discovered that block seventy-four thousand six hundred and thirty-eight contained a transaction that created one hundred and eighty-four billion Bitcoin for three different addresses.
Uh, two addresses received nine, uh, ninety-two-point-two billion Bitcoin each, and whoever solved the block got an extra point zero one Bitcoin that did not exist prior to the transaction.
This was possible because the code used for checking transactions before including them in a block didn't, didn't account for the case of outputs so large that they overflowed when summed.
So basically, an older version of the code didn't account for outputs that were actually exogenous to the supply, and you could kind of input, um, additional Bitcoin that would inflate the supply over the twenty-one million cap that we just discussed.
Uh, this was fixed very quickly. A new version of the client was published within five hours that contained a soft fork change to the consensus rules that rejected output value overflow transactions,
as well as any transaction that paid more than twenty-one million Bitcoin in any output for any reason.
Now, the interesting thing about this is this is contentious because the blockchain was actually forked, um, and this is called a soft fork because it ended up being resolved pretty quickly, I guess.
But as the wiki says here, although many updated unpatched nodes continued to build on the, quote, bad, end quote, blockchain, the, quote, good, end quote, blockchain overtook it at block height seventy-four thousand six hundred and ninety-one, at which point all nodes accepted the good blockchain as the authoritative source of Bitcoin transaction history.
Now, I don't know. To me, it sounds like that was a hard fork, right? You ended up having the Bitcoin blockchain split into two different transaction histories.
Now, for those who don't know, a hard fork occurs when there is a backwards incompatible change to where you have certain nodes on the network following one rule set and another set of nodes following a separate rule set.
And because of that, the incompatibility ends up splitting the transaction history into two. Now, this obviously resolved. There were very few people using Bitcoin at this time.
It would have been catastrophic if something like this happened today. But it's a good reminder that human error lurks around all of these upgrades, right?
And as we'll see with some of these or a-a-a, with, with all of the changes to Bitcoin, and as we will see with the follow-up, uh, y- forks that we're going to discuss here,
there's a reason that Bitcoin developers move almost at a painfully glacial pace when they want to update Bitcoin, because there are so many moving parts, not just within Bitcoin itself, but some of the other things they use, like libraries for storing data, which we'll touch in a second, that could end up screwing things up.
And it ends up being a huge pain in the ass to fix. And as Bitcoin grows in its user base, the ability to fix those things,
n-number one, is subject to greater scrutiny by the community, and the coordination is also greater when you have more cooks in the kitchen, right?
You know, on the subject of, like, did Bitcoin hard fork back when we had the inflation bug, I think that's the strongest argument, that scenario is the strongest argument that we did.
But there is a really interesting piece on this by Jameson Lopp, lopp.net, called Has Bitcoin Ever Hard Forked?, where he goes through and argues that, uh, yes, there's a semantic argument that you can, that we did, but, uh, his evaluation is that we didn't.
I think this is a really interesting topic because, um, com- you know, topics such as hard and soft forks, uh, can be, can be simple to explain sometimes, but to get into the weeds, they can actually get really confusing and often rely a lot on semantics, um,
even if we have strict technical definitions of some of these, um, uh, some of these, uh, events. So there was another fork early on in Bitcoin's history in two thousand thirteen that was completely unintentional.
At, in the latest version of Bitcoin Core at the time, point eight,
uh, the developers decided to switch the database used to store blocks and transactions from Berkeley DB to LevelDB to create a more efficient, uh, infrastructure that would basically reduce synchroniz- synchronization time between nodes.
So nodes have to be constantly syncing with each other on the latest block, and this would lower the latency for that.
This is an article in Bitcoin Magazine, if you're watching on video, by Vitalik Buterin when he was still writing for Bitcoin Magazine back in the time. Um- That could be its own thing. That's like four point three.
Vitalik used to write for Bitcoin Magazine [chuckles]. Yeah. He actually- He owned Bitcoin Magazine. Yeah, he founded it. Yeah. Which is, again, one of those things that people don't know, which is just really funny.
So all of these little unknowns and hidden history bits in our little Easter egg hunt today. Yeah.
But anyway, for this fork, what ended up happening was, um, when they made the change to the database, they didn't account for the fact that the new database actually had a limit on the inputs of data that were allowed to go in it.
So as a result, there were too many transactions in a block. As, uh, a-as, as Buterin writes here, in the case of Bitcoin, the limit for the database was ten thousand.
What happenedIn block, uh, two hundred and twenty-five thousand four hundred and thirty was that the single block simultaneously affected the status of over five thousand transactions requiring more than ten thousand locks on the B-tree to be made at the same time.
As a result, the Berkeley Database... the Berkeley DB failed, and so the older Bitcoin diamond zero point seven, the earlier version, could not read the block because it was outside of its scope.
As a result, this ended up splitting the chain. Developers and miners got together, and they decided to revert back to zero point seven.
Now, this is an example of a completely unintentional hard fork, whereas before they soft forked and the chain was split because of that. This one was completely unintentional, and it was resolved shortly after.
There was, there was some loss of funds, uh, but it didn't end up being, um, that monetarily damaging to any of the actors involved. Some miners lost out on block rewards. Obviously, they hate that.
But it ended up not being too awful.
But there was a bug that was potentially catastrophic and was hidden by developers in twenty eighteen, and that is our third of this three-part part four of our- This one is spicy because we only got, like, a-- This is, like, lore that it-- that was only recently created.
One hundred percent. And so this is taken from the great Aaron Van Wieertum of Bitcoin Magazine, one of the, if not the greatest technical writer ever to cover Bitcoin as a journalist.
And the article that I'm looking at on video here is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Details of one of Bit-Bitcoin's nastiest soft forks yet. So the bug itself was exposed in an update of Bitcoin Core.
It was Bitcoin Core zero point fourteen, which was released on March twenty seventeen.
In short, I quote Aaron here, "The bug would have, would have nodes fail to reject a block containing a transaction that spends the same coins multiple times.
Indeed, it would allow for an irregular form of double spending, arguably the very thing Bitcoin was designed to prevent." So basically,
at the time, the developers said that this bug would have created syncing errors and potentially bricked or crashed the blockchain, but they didn't say why, and the reason was because of this inflation and double-spending bug.
And they ended up hurrying to release a patch, and they released a new version of Bitcoin Core without mentioning the bug, and we didn't actually find out about the bug until afterwards.
So the TLDR of this one is that this was an inflation bug pretty similar to the prior inflation bug, and it would have allowed for double spending.
But all three of these would have created conditions in which you could spend coins that you wouldn't be allowed to spend via some sort of either inflating the supply, like with the first one, or through a double spend, like with the latter two.
So- Yeah, this kinda highlights two really interesting points. One, it highlights why Bitcoin Core contributors and that project is so conservative. In fact, they are,
I would say, uh, they have a healthy paranoia around, um, making sure they deliver, uh, versions, version updates with no bugs. And this is one of the reasons why there is a lot of caution around fork discussion.
On the other hand, it also demonstrates how these develop-- how the, the core of the Bitcoin Core developers have so much, uh, control and influence over what the chain actually looks like.
This is solved in a fairly insular, quiet, secretive fashion. So you can view this two ways.
You can view this as it's really good that they did this and handled it this way, but then you can also view it as this could be a risk because this was really just, um, a small, you know, inside group of people who are solving an issue.
I'm just glad they happened to be aligned. So, like, this is a really interesting, um, case study for how Bitcoin consensus, uh, evolves, and it tells you, um, you know, we had our conference up next.
The, the first one in February, we had, um, Rusty Russell at Blockstream say, "Well, developers aren't in control, but they do have this giant veto card." Um, and, uh,
that, you know, can kind of be demonstrated here that, um, they are able to deliver patches in, um,
probably the, the way which is the least encumbered, uh, by having to go through the consensus-building process. Well said. Shall we move on to number five? The last one. Number five. Perhaps
the most well-known thing that we've talked about on this, depending on the listener, but there is another side to this history that I'm about to discuss that most people don't know, and that is of...
that is the story of one Laszlo Hanyecz, the infamous Bitcoin pizza man who- Oh, the pizza, the Bit-Bitcoin pizza guy whose name I can never pronounce- Yeah.
I'm- Nor can any of the, uh, talking heads, except for you, Colin, I guess. Well, I mean, I could be completely butchering it. Okay. And so Laszlo, if you're listening to this, I apologize.
But most of y'all- But you also wrote the article, Colin. You're citing yourself. [laughs] This is true dogfooding. This is dogfooding, baby. This is dogfooding outside of block space.
This was from my days at Bitcoin Magazine in twenty nineteen, and I wrote this on Bitcoin Pizza Day in twenty nineteen, which is May twenty-second, saying that, "The man behind Bitcoin Pizza Day is more than a meme.
He's a mining pioneer."
So for those who may not know, and even those who do, Laszlo is famously or infamously branded as the Bitcoin pizza guy because back in May twenty-two and twenty ten, uh, twenty-- uh, May twenty-second in twenty ten, he spent roughly ten thousandBitcoin on two Papa John's pizza orders.
He went on Bitcoin Talk. He said, "I would like to buy some pizza and pay for it in Bitcoin. Can someone order me pizza? I will send you the Bitcoin." Voila, the Bitcoin pizza purchase was cemented in history.
Now, what most people don't know about Laszlo, his very material contributions to Bitcoin are overshadowed as a result of the pizza purchase, and that is he was a core maintainer at one time, I believe in twenty-ten.
He introduced the first macOS client for Bitcoin Core. So if you're running Bitcoin Core at home on a macOS, Laszlo is the godfather, or I should say, the progenitor of that.
And for, uh, my purposes as a journalist who focuses a lot on Bitcoin mining, he was the first guy to roll out a client for mining Bitcoin with a GPU. So he introduced the macOS client
in May second, twenty-ten, and then eight days later, he updated the thread on Bitcoin Talk with an updated macOS X binary client that people could use, as he writes here, to use their GPU to generate bitcoins.
This was essentially as, as I will argue here, the
first step away from Bitcoin's days of innocence into that of experience with regards to Bitcoin mining, because you could make an argument that with GPU mining came the first step towards more organized industrial-scale Bitcoin mining that we now see today in massive data centers drawing hundreds of megawatts, right?
In the early days, people were mining Bitcoin on their CPUs. They would- maybe they would run multiple, right? That, that's very likely possible.
But it wasn't until Laszlo introduced GPU mining that miners started taking and buying up GPUs, you know, and putting multiple GPU units on a rack and farming Bitcoin out of their basements, their bonus rooms, their attics, wherever, right?
And so you can kind of see in the GPU mining farms that emerged from people's homes, the hobbyist side of Bitcoin mining evolving into a quasi-professional, more serious version
of the early forms of Bitcoin mining that were done just largely by cypherpunk, um, enthusiasts, right?
Obviously, there were multiple iterations like ASIC manufacturing and the introduction of that by Canaan in twenty-thirteen that got us to where we are today.
But I think there's a strong argument to be made that Laszlo basically took the first step into creating the modern behemoths that we see today in the Bitcoin mining landscape.
And that's part of the reason, at least my reading of the interview that I had with him for this article back in twenty-nineteen, that he did the pizza purchase at all.
So- Because he had all this Bitcoin on him, and he had been using it. He'd been getting it from the GPUs that he was running, so he had ten thousand Bitcoin. One hundred percent.
But even more than that, I think he had a guilty conscience. So, um, Hanyecz was in correspondence with Satoshi at the time.
And in this article, as I write, uh, as I wrote, uh, six years ago, after he shared the GPU mining code with the creator, Satoshi made his opinion known that he thought it was too advanced for Bitcoin's stage of development.
Quote from Satoshi, "A big attraction to new users is that anyone with a computer can generate some free coins," he wrote in an email to Hanyecz.
"GPUs would prematurely limit the incentive to those who- those with high-end GPU hardware. It's inevitable that GPU computer clusters will eventually hog all the generated coins, but I don't want to hasten that day."
And to quote from Laszlo, "That's when I was like, 'Man, I feel like I crapped on your project. Sorry, dude.'
He was concerned that some people might be discouraged because they can't mine a block with a CPU, so I stopped advertising it after that."
Now, Laszlo did not explicitly say this in the interview, but it's almost like his purchasing the pizzas were a form of penance for the fact that he hastened the GPU mining that, that Satoshi envisioned would happen eventually.
But like he said, Bitcoin was barely a year old at this point. He didn't want that to come any sooner than it should. And so Laszlo almost divested himself of this fortune that he amassed, and he didn't just do it once.
So the, the, the ten-thousand-Bitcoin pizza order is the one that's recorded and often cited, but as he revealed in this interview with me in twenty-nineteen, he estimates that he spent a hundred thousand Bitcoin over the following year on purchases for pizza and other things via Bitcoin Talk.
Man, it just, just goes to show you, like, the crazy path dependency of Bitcoin early on. One hundred percent. I mean, you know- And- So you see- Go ahead.
Go a- oh, uh, you, you see Satoshi, like, also talking very, um, 'cause Satoshi themselves were very concerned with, like, the adoption path that Bitcoin took.
Um, for example, some of the last things Satoshi was talking about was, and worried about was that, um, when WikiLeaks under Julian Assange started taking Bitcoin donations, Satoshi was afraid that that was too early, uh, for Bitcoin to receive that much attention, and he-- and they were concerned with the...
It's like, man, I wish we could've... I think, what was the term? Like, what was the word? I think they said, "I wish we could, we could've like, you know, waited another couple years for this." Um- Right. Yeah.
And so, like, you can see Laszlo, uh, a lot of the early adopters either intuitively understood this or through just association, uh, went out of their way, uh, in non-selfish, uh, manners to try to, like,
uh, through human... a guiding human personal hand, uh, improve the long-term, uh, viability of Bitcoin from a distribution and a network health standpoint.
And for those of you who are sitting at home shuddering, thinking about the fact that Laszlo didn't just spend what would now be almost a billion dollars' worth of BitcoinYou know, like roughly nine hundred and thirty million at the time on the first Bitcoin pizza purchase.
He conceivably spent as much as what would be worth almost ten billion dollars today, all because he didn't want to screw up Satoshi's project allegedly, right? That's my reading of it.
But what I love about that is, people always focus on the monetary side of this or, or the, um, what the gains that Laszlo forfeited by doing this. Two things. Number one, as Laszlo told me in the interview,
there was no guarantee of Bitcoin success at this time. It was a hobbyist thing. It was the domain of obscure coders, developers, and cypherpunks, and forums on the internet.
No one was using Bitcoin seriously, and the Silk Road was just starting to take off.
There were-- There really wasn't a monetary value assigned to Bitcoin at this point, and no one could have known that it was going to where it, it is today. The second thing is, Laszlo has a really good
humor about all of this and doesn't seem to have too much regret about it.
As he says in this article, or as he quoted to me when I wrote this article, you know, he said, "We would just give people bitcoins on the forum, sometimes a hundred, sometimes a thousand."
And he said, "I wanted to do the pizza thing because to me it was free pizza. I mean- [laughs] "I coded this thing and mined Bitcoin, and I felt like I was winning the internet that day.
I got pizza for contributing to an open source project. Usually, hobbies are a time sink and a money sink, and in this case, my hobby bought me dinner."
I just love that anecdote because he's taking it totally on the chin and has no regrets at all. Also, it's very likely that he held on to some of his Bitcoin.
He was active for quite a few years afterwards, and if you see some of these interviews that local media in Florida or national media have done with him on Bitcoin Pizza Day, you know, to kind of pluck out the salacious talking points of how much money he forfeited, he's got a beautiful home, a beautiful family.
Dude's doing fine. Sure, he's not a billionaire, but would he have held those coins to-today? Probably not. I-I like to... I mean, I...
It is a good headline I think, uh, and it's fun to talk about 'cause it's a, it's become part of the core Bitcoin mythos.
But, you know, to anyone who says things like, "Man, I, I, I saw Bitcoin in, you know, two thousand and seven, and I wish I could've bought some."
[laughs] But or, you know, more realistically, someone might have actually seen it in twenty-ten, be like, "I'm kicking myself for never buying some." Like, you know, if you bought it back then, you're super lucky.
And I, and I say like, "Yeah, well, you could have bought it in two thousand and twelve, and thirteen, and fourteen, and fifteen."
I like to say to the person who feels that, um, they simply just got unlucky on by not buying Bitcoin a long time ago,
um, I think that just by not having Bitcoin today, uh, would demonstrate that you would have sold that Bitcoin on the path somewhere. Um,
uh, I just think that, like, not having Bitcoin today is almost, uh, both validation that you would not have, uh, held onto it as well as, uh, uh, uh, some, you know, something to lament for not having done a decade ago.
So, um, 'cause this is- I think that's good. It's like everyone's an idea guy, but very few people are the execution people. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Okay, bonus? Bonus. Bonus. Bonus. So
m- some of you may be familiar with the meme, "Have fun staying poor," popularized by one Udi Wertheimer in the last run-up of Bitcoin in twenty twenty-one. What you might not know is that is not an Udi original.
In fact, it is an original from the grimy underworld of the internet, the since deceased and to never be resurrected 4chan. Now, we could not actually find proof of this. You have to take it on my word.
Yeah, I tried to go to, I tried to go to 4chan. It was down, Colin. And it's gone forever. Apparently, the code base is completely wiped, so no one even knows how to resurrect it. There was no backup.
But you're gonna have to trust my word on this one as someone who frequented the Biz forums, which was the finance forum back in twenty seventeen.
[laughs] And this meme actually originated from people who would shill Chainlink, the oracle protocol for Ethereum. Back in the day, this was during the ICO boom, for those who might remember.
There were all of these projects getting thrown out, and Chainlink's thesis, which ended up being correct, was that all of these applications built on Ethereum are going to need an oracle that can feed data in a fashion where the incentives are aligned, where no one's going to cheat it, right?
So the thinking here is imagine you have a betting protocol.
How do you know the outcome of-- How does the Ethereum network know the outcome of that protocol so the smart contracts can execute in such a way that the winners get paid and the losers lose what they staked?
If you don't have a neutral oracle, people can manipulate the data and basically steal funds that are not theirs, depending on outcomes.
There are multiple other applications for this, for like DeFi and stuff in terms of pricing.
Anyway, these oracles feed information to smart contracts to make sure that they execute the terms of the smart contract properly.
Chainlink ended up becoming the most successful oracle for Ethereum and, you know, one of the most successful tokens from that time, and if you were on Biz back in twenty seventeen, it was the thing that would get constantly shilled in the s- almost in the same kind of, uh, you know, religious way that Bitcoin maximalists approach Bitcoin.
If you didn't own Chainlink on Biz, people would call you highly regarded and think that you were just there to lose money.
So if you weren't willing to invest in Chainlink and drink the Kool-Aid, people would say, "Have fun staying poor."
And that was a common mantra of the posters on Biz at the time because-You know, Chainlink was everyone's ticket to Valhalla. And funnily enough, there's a lot of bad advice on Biz at the time.
It's anonymous open forum, um, projects would show their tokens there all the time. But if you actually- Yeah, people just forget all of the dumb things that were on there. And there were a lot.
Yeah, we remember it, yeah. Including people pushing, uh, other anons to buy coins for master staking back in the day. This was a huge thesis where, like, there...
I think it was like there were a bunch of them like NEO and VeChain and stuff. Oh, yeah, VeChain, yeah. [laughs] The, the logistics blockchain. Before Ethereum even launched proof of stake, right?
This was four years before that, or sorry, five years before that.
Master staking or masternodes were a huge thing where basically you accumulate a certain number of a token and then you can get a masternode and stake and earn rewards.
A lot of those are in the dustbin of history, but Chainlink has persisted, and if you'd listened to that, you would've done pretty well.
But I just think that's a really funny tidbit because most people think that's a Bitcoin meme. It actually comes from the Chainlink ecosystem, which is arguably more annoying and toxic than- Yes, it's possible...
the Bitcoin maximalist ecosystem. Well, history is written by the victors, and Bitcoin, uh, uh- Bitcoin... as the market has chosen Bitcoin over Chainlink, uh, at least as an investable asset.
Um, so we can rewrite history. In fact, you know, we are the screenwriters of Bitcoin season two, and we're going to retcon the mythos of Bitcoin. So, um, yeah, so, uh, it's now officially, uh, a Bitcoin term.
Bi- Chainlink never existed, uh, in, in this universe. Um, anyway, I'm totally kidding, but, uh, Colin, we just counted down the top five things. Yes, we did do a clickbait title. I thank you all for listening to this.
Um, if you have any questions, uh, love or hate the show, shout us out. Leave us a review in the description if you're listening on Spotify. Make sure you hit follow, and make sure you write a review.
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[upbeat music] [laughs] Okay. Okay, we're back. Uh, okay, no, actually I'm not. Top five