Pizza for bitcoins? [2010] | Hacker News Reader

Pizza for bitcoins? [2010]

bitcointalk.org

45 pointssgpl26 comments

It's worth bearing in mind that bitcoin might never have reached the position it now holds if early adopters had not spent their coins as freely as they did.

Had heard about this story some time last year, this was the conclusion quickly reached at my office. The amount of effect his purchase had on the early adoption of bitcoin is practically immeasurable.

Any pain he feels over perceived 'opportunity loss' is effectively him 'taking one for the team', with the team being the bitcoin community. As mentioned elsewhere, I'm sure he did fine having mined early.

It's even more valuable to bear in mind that the value of Bitcoin would not be as high as it is now if more people had spend it as freely.

BTW this is the pizza he bought- http://www.heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/pizza/

I hope that at least it was good :) (For $10M)

It didn't cost $10M.

I was in those IRC channels back then and you could buy thousands of bitcoins for a few bucks. There were only like 200 of us who even knew what they were or valued them in any way.

Man that is crazy. I got in at $1-$10 a coin and I'm worried about it because I talked about it so much back then, but for you guys it must be insane.

He was offering 10,000 BTC for two large pizzas. At today's exchange rates that's close to $10 million. I didn't bother to read the whole thread, but if he did eventually buy them, I hope they were at least delicious.

He did buy them, and although a lot of people probably think he's an idiot for it, bear in mind he is most likely a multimillionaire if not a billionaire by now.

He's not even remotely close to being a billionaire, a pretty hefty exaggeration. That would require that he mined nearly 10% of all bitcoins.

He talks about basically having 'thrown away' 40,000+ bitcoins that were easy to mine initially before he stopped and began holding onto what he was mining. It's more likely he's in the $10m to $50m range, assuming he didn't liquidate early into bitcoin's rise.

No, he is definitely closer to a billion.

> He's not even remotely close to being a billionaire, a pretty hefty exaggeration. That would require that he mined nearly 10% of all bitcoins.

My bad, sometimes I forget just how big a billion is

Still, this is kind of the epitome of spending money to make money. This pizza was one of the first notable examples of people using bitcoin as a currency. It proved the concept. Its not certain had he not spent those bitcoins on the pizza the rest of his minings would be worth much.

> So nobody wants to buy me pizza? Is the bitcoin amount I'm offering too low?

Got to laugh seeing this today.

Sure today yes, but you have to put that into context.

So how do these very large bitcoin holders cash out now? Is there somebody that provides a service to slow sell them?

You can set a limit order on your favorite exchange. It will sit there and sell them off for the price you specify as people are willing to buy them. Of course, if anyone is selling them cheaper than you, yours won't sell until theirs are gone.

Alternatively you can just place a market order a few times per day for a week. It's more work, but we're really only talking about ~1 minute of work per $200k or so. MtGox handles more than $10M in Bitcoin sales per day and they represent a minority of all exchange volume.

The problem is getting paid by Mt Gox in dollars, euro etc as many horror stories exist of people not being paid for months or ever

Other exchanges would also have similar issues, and would hit you with all sorts of antimoneylaundering questions if you try to withdraw too much

Increase granularity, decrease risk magnitude.

Fair enough, but Bitstamp is also doing close to $10M/day. You are probably right about the AML hurdle, but that is orthogonal to needing a service to sell them off slowly for you.

See here for an example questions they ask personal customers trying too withdraw above certain limit (not sure what it is exactly or what criteria is used to trigger this)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=356026.msg3835542#ms...

As KYC questionnaire a company has to answer here is alot longer than above, I am not sure if allowed to post it, but it is very thorough

There are also some high-volume sales that are done off the exchanges, mainly by big investors who don't want to disturb the market and buy directly from early adopters.

One company that does that is http://epiphyte.us (which I happened to speak with today, but I'm not affiliated with them):

    We provide customers who are looking to enter the digital asset space with
    deep, off-market pools of liquidity. Through these liquidity pools,
    we operate as broker/dealers for large blocks of digital assets.

Edit: Also, a thread on Reddit about what appears to be a big off-exchange sale of 117,000 BTC that was supposedly related to Fortress's Bitcoin fund:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1u4fc6/record_numbe...

coinbase.com definitely has this feature[1].

1. http://i.imgur.com/ZvLEsvO.png

There's a few groups trying to make a Bitcoin ETF who are amassing coins from private buyers in large purchases done as dark trades that don't manipulate the overall price of BTC.

All those new cashing out corp/merchant services like Bitpay and Coinlab don't have any limits either to the amount you can turn into fiat

I didn't read the rest of the forum posts, but has there been any update from either party?

Yes. I believe the poster completed at least one transaction and this is the famous "pizza story" in the Bitcoin world.

I should have elaborated a bit. I meant has the person that received the bitcoins providing updates recently (ie. Spending my millions on a private island in the Caribbean).

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