Pizza Day is a day of regret.
We all know the story. Laszlo Hanyecz buys two Papa John’s pizzas and some lucky guy got 10,000 BTC on this day 12 years ago. The story is like that of Peter Minuit buying Manhattan Island for $24. We can hardly believe that such a thing was possible given its value today.
The story has a lot of interesting angles.
It was the first real-world good or service purchased with bitcoin.
It established bitcoin’s price, since the two pizzas cost about $41, one BTC was about $0.0041.
There’s also Laszlo, a guy whose innovation was mining bitcoin using GPUs (graphics processing units). He acted like a drunken sailor spending 100,000 BTC on pizzas, as he did the same deal several more times that month.
RENT-SEEKING DAYDREAMS
The part that everyone fantasizes about is being that guy that bought the 10,000 BTC for $41.
We don’t fantasize about being Laszlo because we aren’t GPU programming experts. We can, however, imagine being the guy on the bitcointalk forums offering to buy bitcoin for a couple of pizzas.
Pizza Day brings out that daydream of being a bitcoin billionaire from having made a single brilliant trade. We all hate the actual guy that made this trade because we want to be him. We see the guy as lucky, as having won the lottery and we are envious.
This fantasy is borne of a fiat mentality.
This hierarchy of values comes from fiat money. The desire is to be lucky instead of good. We would rather do no work and make money rather than provide goods and services and get paid.
It’s telling that the regret is about missed-out luck rather than missed-out innovation.
It’s easier in a fiat world to dream about being the guy that sold pizza than being the guy who had the foresight to mine with GPUs.
This is fiat accomplishment, getting lucky with money, versus real accomplishment which is earning the money by providing goods and services to the market.
Most people would rather get lucky being associated with an innovator than be the innovator themselves !!!
- Learn about Inflation Folks!
- Free Spirit’s Library
- What is Bretton Woods ?!?
- Smart Contracts by Nick Szabo-1994
- 20 Security Rules for bitcoin
BitHouse 