Today is the Bitcoin Pizza Day: Know its origin and how it will be celebrated in some countries of South America

While in Argentina it is being raised to donate food and basic necessities to people in street situations, in Chile there will be a pizza night and it is still possible to get free or promotional tickets.

Today is the Bitcoin Pizza Day, a celebration that takes place around the world to celebrate a super simple but momentous event for the cryptocurrency. Today is exactly eight years of the day that 10,000 bitcoins (BTC) were used to buy two pizzas. At that time, it was worth USD $ 41 equivalent. Now, the same amount is worth more than USD $ 83 million.

According to the anecdote that has been reviewed many times, this "pair of pizzas" was requested by a man named Laszlo Hanyecz, and this was Bitcoin's first use in the real world as a payment system. The decentralized virtual currency emerged for the first time in 2009, created, as you know, by Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym that although many developers have been attributed, we still do not know who it really is. Over the years it has gained popularity and, at the end of 2017, only one of these digital currencies was worth the equivalent of USD $ 20,000. Today, when it is 9:00 am in New York, its value is USD $ 8,197.46.

REMEMBERING THE HISTORY

The history of the purchase of pizza was like this: on May 18, 2010, Hanyecz told users in a Bitcoin forum that they would pay 10,000 BTC for the pizza order, whether it was from a restaurant or made at home. The original message reads as follows:

"You can make the pizza yourself and take it to my house or ask for it from a place of delivery, but what I want is to receive food in exchange for bitcoins where I do not have to order or prepare it myself. breakfast "in a hotel or something, they just bring you something to eat and you're happy! I like things like onions, peppers, sausages, mushrooms, tomatoes, pepperoni, etc. simply as standard ingredients, without thick fish trimmings or anything of that".

In the forum, still online, Hanyecz added: "I also like regular cheese pizzas, which can be cheaper to prepare or purchase differently. If you are interested, let me know and we can reach an agreement. "

After a few days, a man with the alias "Jercos", whose real name was Jeremy Sturdivant, complied with the food order. And on May 22, Hanyecz confirmed: "I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for a pizza." The transaction was carried out using IRC (Internet Relay Chat).

Subsequently, Lazlo published images of the two pizzas, which apparently were from Papa Johns. One commentator, "Ribuck," joked: "This will eventually become the first million-dollar pizza in the world?" Well, yes, he was right. From that moment, in addition, the reference of the value of those pizzas has realized the increase of Bitcoin.

Sturdivant then said that he believed that the pizzas sent were from Dominos, which caused some confusion. "I'm beginning to regret not having saved the event's chat logs, as I clearly remember Domino's pizza (even its particular web interface), but the images show Papa John's," he said. Still, the transaction happened. Thanks to the Blockchain records, you can still see it online today.

A Twitter bot created to track Bitcoin values ​​daily - using the handle @ bitcoin_pizza - wrote today: "The #Bitcoin pizza is worth USD $ 83,131,600 today. (-2% yesterday) Today is the day of Bitcoin pizza! "

Hanyecz told the New York Times in 2013 that he did not regret the exchange. He said he later sold his Bitcoin, worth around USD $ 4,000, to get a new computer and a couple of new video cards. "So I would say that I ended up at the top," he said. Sturdivant, meanwhile, told a dedicated cryptography website in 2015 that he was aware that the transaction, if successful, had the potential to make cryptocurrencies.

I just took a visible step as part of the community's growing trust in bitcoin, it did not feel unique in the sense that if I had not accepted that offer, surely someone else would ... but at the same time, I was certainly somewhat conscious of that this was setting a precedent for occasional trade with bitcoin, "he told bitcoinwhoswho.com. Looking back, he declared: "In retrospect, simply having that bitcoin in one place is a pretty crazy idea. Of course, that was not remarkable at that time, since the bitcoin was just beginning, and otherwise it felt like later [smaller] transactions."