10,000 BTC worth only $25? The story of Bitcoin pizza
Written by: Haotian
This is truly a story that is sadder than sad.
On May 18, 2010, programmer Laszlo posted that he hoped to exchange 10,000 bitcoins for two large pizzas. Three days later, cryptography enthusiast jercos spent $25 to buy two pizzas and sent them to Laszlo, earning 10,000 bitcoins.
If we go back to the context of the time, perhaps this story is not so sad:
1. At that time, it was only a little over a year since the first Bitcoin genesis block was created. Bitcoin was just a tool for cryptography enthusiasts to reward each other. It did not have a price pegged to legal tender, and no one might have thought of exchanging it for money. The genius programmer Laszlo, for the first time, priced Bitcoin by exchanging it for pizza, inadvertently advancing the process of legal tenderization of virtual digital currencies. He also became the first person to purchase goods with Bitcoin, and was recorded in history.
2. At that time, the competition for Bitcoin mining computing power was very small. Laszlo used GPU instead of CPU mining, and could get 1-2 block rewards per hour. At that time, one block rewarded 50 Bitcoins. On May 17 alone, he received 1,400 Bitcoin rewards. Based on the low-cost Bitcoin mining income at that time, this guy may have owned many Bitcoins, and exchanging them for some pizza may not be a big deal.
3. At that time, I was able to get access to virtual digital currency and earn income through mining. If I had continued to participate in virtual digital currency mining in the past 10 years and invested a little more, even if I missed out on Bitcoin, then Litecoin, Ripple, Ethereum, etc., as long as I grabbed any one of them, I would most likely be able to achieve what is considered financial freedom in the eyes of the world.
However, a sad story still happened:
1. After Laszlo tasted the sweetness of buying pizza for the first time, he spent another 40,000 bitcoins on pizza. When the value of bitcoin rose to $1, he sold all his bitcoins and bought a new computer.
2. Laszlo is still a programmer at Florida online retail company GoRuck, which is not much different from his job when he bought Bitcoin 9 years ago.
3. Jercos, who received 10,000 bitcoins, did not wait until December 2017 when bitcoin reached its highest point of $20,000. He sold the 10,000 bitcoins after earning more than 10 times the profit.
I believe that those who have entered the digital currency field in the past year have sighed and lamented that if they had entered the field of digital currency a few years earlier, they might have achieved financial freedom. However, after reading this story of exchanging Bitcoin for pizza, you should understand that many things are missed, and it is meaningless to make such an assumption of "knowing it earlier".
Similar story templates are not unique to the field of virtual digital currency.
You must have heard about Xiao Wang from Beijing, who sold his small courtyard house in Beijing for less than 300,000 yuan, worked hard abroad and earned 6 million yuan. Now he is back home, and he finds that the courtyard house he sold that year has skyrocketed to 80 million yuan. He vomited blood on the spot and was admitted to the hospital.
Or, Li Ka-shing's son, Richard Li, who held 20% shares of Tencent at the time, sold them to South Africa's MIH Group for US$12.6 million in 2001, missing out on more than 400 billion.
etc……
In any investment in value-added commodities with fluctuations in value, including gold, jewelry, artwork, antiques, stocks, real estate, etc., there are countless things that people regret later. As the saying goes, once an investment product enters the market, it should follow certain market exchange rules.
Bill Gates once said that true wealth = concept + time. It can be seen that the acquisition of any wealth needs to go through the test of time, and the profit and loss on paper during this period are the biggest test of your concept and cognition.
Through the Bitcoin pizza incident, we should at least gain the following enlightenment:
1. Rational investment has limitations, and cognitive upgrading is the hard truth
It seems like a group of people are laughing at a fool, but in fact, everyone is very ordinary.
Many people say that if the 10,000 bitcoins were not used to buy pizza, they would be worth at least $160 million if they were sold at the peak in 2017. Therefore, everyone would unconsciously guess the psychological shadow area of Laszlo while chatting and laughing, and they all thought he was a fool who missed the opportunity to become a billionaire.
However, if most people were to experience Laszlo's life, I'm afraid that people above 99% would make the same choice as him. Just like we envy those friends who invested $300-500 in Bitcoin in the early years, thinking that they have become financially free. In fact, even among those who entered the market in the early days of digital currency development, there are only a handful of people who have truly achieved financial freedom. Most people either invested in a lot of Bitcoin but lost their private keys; or bought Bitcoin at a very low price and sold it when the price increased by 10-100 times; or after missing out on Bitcoin, they were overshadowed by the shadow of missing out, and began to turn from fans to haters, and completely bid farewell to the field of digital currency investment;
In any case, investing in digital currency is reallymake moneyThe people who have made it through the investment process did not rely on rational investment logic, but on their mindless beliefs and incomprehensible madness. If they are winners in life, it is because of their advanced cognitive abilities and the psychological qualities to resist the fluctuations in the financial market.
Li Xiaolai once joked that his digital currency account had 200 million more after one sleep and 100 million less after another sleep. Those who can still invest in the currency standard under such fluctuations have a high level of cognition.Xiaobai NavigationIt is beyond our reach.
On February 25 last year, Laszlo spent 0.00649 BTC through the Lightning Network and bought two more pizzas. Laszlo said he had no regrets about losing hundreds of millions of dollars, and the pizza he got in return was delicious.
This calm and relaxed attitude is worthy of our admiration.
2. High-multiple investment opportunities are still available, but low-principal counterattacks may be gone
History will not repeat itself, but it will rhyme.
Many people like to use the pizza incident as an excuse and advise those around them to hold on to a coin to avoid another tragedy like the pizza incident. In fact, such worries are somewhat redundant. Bitcoin's rise of tens of millions of times is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. After that, Ripple also rose tens of millions of times. In recent years, mainstream currencies such as Ethereum, Litecoin, and BNB have also had incredible investment returns.
JustBinanceTake the platform coin BNB as an example. It was launched in July 2017 and then it broke down, falling to 0.6 yuan at the lowest. Now it has risen to 230 yuan. Although it is not as crazy as Bitcoin, it is a rare opportunity for us all to gain wealth appreciation. However, how many people have seized it? In the forum, we can see many people's grief, complaints, and complaints after missing out. It looks like many people who missed out on Bitcoin many years ago. Come, let's lip-sync: "That person looks so weird, he looks like a dog."
So, will there be another investment opportunity like Bitcoin in the future?
Most likely, there is none. Because for most people, what they lack is not a high multiple return, but a low principal counterattack opportunity. Unlike real estate investment, secondary market stocks, primary market angel investment, etc., the investment principal of early Bitcoin is negligible. While real estate and stocks seem to have a large multiple return, the principal to be paid is something most people cannot afford. For example, the average price of a house in Beijing 20 years ago was 2,000 yuan, which is as low as it can be from today's perspective, but at that time, the monthly salary was less than 1,000 yuan, and how many people could afford to buy a house?
Now everyone has a general understanding of Bitcoin and wants to invest in it, but the price of over 50,000 yuan will discourage most people. Even if you tell them that Bitcoin can rise to 1 million or even 10 million in the future, few people will sell their houses or cars to bet on Bitcoin for tomorrow (even if there are some, it is not recommended).
Influenced by the Bitcoin Pizza incident, many people now choose to invest in some altcoins in digital currencies, trying to achieve wealth freedom with low-cost investment and relying on the altcoins to grow hundreds or thousands of times. Sadly, such projects lack the most basic characteristics of Bitcoin: the total supply is scarce and irreplaceable (consensus), and it can continue to increase in value during circulation.
Nowadays, many coins that can increase by 100 times are not open source, and the codes can be changed at will. Some are even completely hyped up by humans using a Ponzi scheme. There are people manipulating the market behind the scenes, and most people will still be cut off. After one wave of cutting, they will change their vests and cut off again in the same way, never giving you a chance to get out of the trap.
This is precisely a cruel contradiction in investing in digital currency at the moment: the investment capital of valuable targets is too high, and the investment in non-valuable targets is too deceptive.
3. “Holding money like a Buddhist” may no longer be the best option
Now the mainstream media is still promoting the extremely high returns of storing digital currencies, which has caused most people to have a wrong perception that digital currency investment must be held in a Buddhist way, and buying and selling transactions will only increase the risk of missing out and being trapped.
Although historical experience tells us that holding coins in a Buddhist way may bring the highest returns, the vision of Bitcoin at its inception was to be used for circulation. As a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, payment scenarios should be greater than other scenarios. Laszlo gave Bitcoin a stronger circulation attribute through the Bitcoin pizza transaction event, which is definitely an outstanding contribution to the history of Bitcoin development.
Of course, due to the block capacity and delayed confirmation characteristics of Bitcoin, it is still difficult to fully circulate Bitcoin. However, the subsequent emergence of side chains and lightning networks is making such efforts. The actual price volatility of Bitcoin is due to information asymmetry. Early investors with chips release chips to new investors at the current price. This process will last for 3-5 years or even longer.
During this period, early users will have the opportunity to obtain high premiums. When the chips are dispersed to a certain extent, Bitcoin in the sense of storage and Bitcoin in the sense of circulation may go their separate ways. Bitcoin will really become digital gold, and other currencies such as stablecoins will be the largest chips in circulation. By then, the Bitcoin pizza incident may become a legendary existence. At that time, there may really be a sense of frustration of missing an era.
It should be said that the next 3-5 years is the best time to get on board, but it is not simply understood as spending 5,000 yuan to invest in 0.1 Bitcoin. In this case, even if it grows 20 times, what does it matter?BlockchainThe industry's technical learning and cognitive improvementBlockchainFind opportunities in the gaps of traditional application scenarios and find opportunities with the soft power of improved industry awareness.SafetyThis is much more meaningful than pure cryptocurrency speculation.
For young people who want to have a chance to turn over in the digital currency market, the Buddhist way of holding coins may not be suitable now. Learning some financial knowledge, grasping the law of the rise and fall of digital currencies, making reasonable fixed investments during the bear market (low cost, low risk), cooperating in the period of bear-to-bull market (compound interest, expand the principal), and cashing out at the peak of the bull market are the correct logic of playing the digital currency market.
Daring to buy is a cognitive breakthrough, while knowing how to sell is the ability to seize the opportunities of the times.
The article comes from the Internet:10,000 BTC worth only $25? The story of Bitcoin pizza
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