He offered 10,000 bitcoins to anyone willing to bring him two large pizzas. Could they really be used to buy anything? While the bitcoins themselves had many of the trappings of real money, ultimately they were just bits of data in cyberspace. So were individuals looking for alternatives to government-issued currencies in the wake of the financial crisis and subsequent bailouts, which they viewed as an example of the kind of government excess that led to devalued currencies.
#Pizza deliveries software#
Software experts, unable to find any major flaws in the system, were intrigued. They existed only inside computers the underlying software generated more virtual coins at a fixed rate and relied on cryptography to prevent fraud. Bitcoins were a new digital currency that had launched about a year and a half earlier. On May 18, 2010, a Florida programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz posted in an online forum that he was interested in buying a couple of pizzas with bitcoins. Here is Sablik’s article.ĭigital Currency: New Private Currencies Like Bitcoin Offer Potential - and Puzzles Can I just say that the thought that a bunch of financial types have gotten involved with a commodity with a hugely volatile price somehow fails to allay my misgivings? But I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
“The grown-ups have entered the room”, the lawyer proclaims, and that “should give some comfort to the regulators that it’s not just a bunch of money launderers”. The author cites a lawyer who, in his attempt to reassure Bitcoin doubters, informs us that Bitcoin is coming of age. Well, if anything, Sablik’s piece reinforces my skepticism. Regular readers will have noted that this blogger is highly skeptical of Bitcoin’s potential - as far as I can tell, Bitcoin, while failing to serve its purported purpose as a medium of exchange, as a store of value it has created a perfectly ordinary bubble, of a kind we’ve seen many, many times over the centuries. Once the history part is covered, we move back to Bitcoin and the challenges the cryptocurrency faces on its way to world domination. Of course, a quote from Adam Smith is prominently featured for good measure as well. Quite apart from the momentous delivery episode, and the “Pizza Index”, which it engendered, we are taken back in time to trace the “origins of money” and the various shapes it took over human history - cattle, shells, salt, etc. What was this guy thinking, paying today’s equivalent of $7.4 million for two pizzas!? And more importantly, did he get any toppings put on them or were they just plain cheese? Also, did he tip the delivery guy in bitcoins or in some fiat currency? If the tip was given in bitcoins, did the programmer pay the standard 20-percent rate (2,000 bitcoins) or did he gyp the delivery guy? Is the delivery guy still a delivery guy? Inquiring minds want to know. Tim Sablik from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond has an interesting piece on Bitcoin, in which he takes us back to the digital currency’s mythical beginnings in May 2010 when a Florida programmer paid, rather improvidently, 10,000 bitcoins to get two large pizzas delivered to him.
0 kommentar(er)
