The Bitcoin community has been unfair with Laszlo Hanyecz and is ignorant of his service to Bitcoin.
Laszlo Hanyecz deserves more recognition for his work on Bitcoin and the Bitcoin community should attribute him with the importance and merit he deserves.
Maybe those that don’t know a lot about Bitcoin’s history have probably heard of the Bitcoin Pizza day and “that guy” that bought two Papa John’s pizzas with 10,000 BTC. They will come up with how many millions this amount is today and mock the “pizza guy” for buying the most expensive pizza in the world.
A Legendary Bitcoin Developer
Laszlo Hanyecz invented GPU mining, but all he got in return was a sh** pizza meme - Bitcoin Magazine (source)
Many in the crypto field are often talking about the “pizza guy” and how he mistakenly used his mined Bitcoins as digital money to buy pizzas and other items.
Sadly, the “HODL” mentality gained acceptance and ground since 2014, and Bitcoin from a P2P electronic cash system as the whitepaper suggests it became an asset that whales kept accumulating and distributing during periods of extreme parabolic growth.
It is evident that currently, most in BTC are just there to make more fiat. And, nobody in the BTC community promotes the idea of P2P electronic cash nowadays.
Most of the early miners, devs, and investors have long abandoned Bitcoin. The reason is they never thought of Bitcoin under Blockstream’s governance being able to achieve the adoption targets it had as a digital currency.
At present, BTC is not about the revolutionary ideas that allowed it to gain acceptance and recognition in its early days.
Laszlo’s Contribution
Laszlo Hanyecz contributed to Bitcoin with his code.
He was the first Bitcoin developer to release the Bitcoin code for Mac OS:
Moreover, he was the first programmer to script GPU mining code for Bitcoin, which he successfully tested and managed to mine with a higher hashrate. He informed Satoshi and the Bitcoin community of his findings but Satoshi seems he was already ahead of Laszlo, having already knowledge of GPU mining and possibly using it to avert 51% of attacks.
Laszlo never regretted spending Bitcoins, unlike what the latest investors think these days. Bitcoin was supposed to become a currency and he was the first one to use it as such before the herd followed him. Bitcoin those days had no value, there was no exchange offering trade.
Laszlo did use Bitcoin as it was supposed to and he is a Bitcoin Legend, one that we need to remember for everything he did to help in the early days.
He was the first Bitcoin spender and more followed. Bitcoin until 2013 was growing as a digital currency, it was later abandoned as such when it was found unable to scale and Blockstream decided no further development on-chain scaling, but secondary networks (layer-2) solutions like LN and Liquid.
Final Thoughts
Laszlo’s contribution to the development and promotion of Bitcoin in the early days is not presented as much as the fact of the first-ever purchase made with Bitcoin.
This event is a historic one for Bitcoin. Sadly, the BTC community doesn’t praise Laszlo for his commitment and efforts to promote the use case of Bitcoin so early. It instead has this stance that buying anything with Bitcoin is a huge mistake since the price was eventually going to rise. A fact that nobody knew at that time.
Laszlo never regretted spending his Bitcoin, since this was the ultimate purpose. Bitcoin was created to become a digital currency revolution. A P2P electronic cash payments network.
The argument that this pizza today costs millions is in error since Bitcoin was used just by a couple of dozens of people these days. Nobody could have predicted that the price of this asset will reach tens of thousands of dollars at least for a couple of years more.
The price of Bitcoin dropped down to zero in exchanges multile times during these first years. At a time when no one knew what exactly Bitcoin was going to be, Laszlo gave Bitcoin the ultimate proof it could be used instead of money.
This is how we should pay our respects to this legendary Bitcoin developer.
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References:
Inside Bitcoins: Laszlo Hanyecs Claims Satoshi Invented GPU Mining To Prevent 51% Attacks
Bitcoin Magazine: THE MAN BEHIND BITCOIN PIZZA DAY IS MORE THAN A MEME: HE’S A MINING PIONEER
Bitcointalk: laszlo (profile)
Images:
Lead Image from: Unsplash (by Michael Förtsch)
Second Image: Source
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Bitcoin started in 2009 and I didn't even know about it until 2017. That's typical of me. Always late to the party. I have heard people call this man the “pizza guy” so often that I did not even know his name. LOL. Do a thousand good things and nobody notices. Make one silly mistake and people will remember it for eternity. Mr. Hanyecz is now numbered amongst the legion of unsung heroes. There are so many people who have done great things and they don't get proper credit for it. You did a good job of honoring him and giving him credit where credit is due.