On a cold evening last week, we searched for a seminar in a building in the shadow of the Empire State Building to learn a little about blockchain. The speaker was Jamiel Sheikh, an adjunct professor at the CUNY School of Professional Studies (SPS) and NYU, and the organizer of the BlockchainNYC Meetup group which he describes as the “official” Blockchain meetup in New York City. In other words, he unilaterally declared his group the centralized organization of a technology built on decentralization. The only problem is that the rest of the world hasn’t been informed of this yet or else refuses to comply. Sheikh led off the seminar with…
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The actual two pizza pies bought for BTC 10,000 by Laszlo Hanyecz in the first known bitcoin purchaseFlorida man blows 10,000 bitcoin on pizza, Twitter bot keeps reminding us 8 years later
Keeping tabs on how much the famous ‘Bitcoin Pizza’ really costs
On May 22, 2010, two pizza pies were bought by a person named Laszlo Hanyecz. While the pies themselves were mundane, the transaction was revolutionary—they were bought with 10,000 bitcoins, worth roughly $41 at the time. Now that one purchase gages the health of the entire $258 billion cryptocurrency market. Of course, that wasn’t always the case. So when Dutch programmer Merijn Bellekom quietly launched the Twitter bot @bitcoin_pizza in 2015, he didn’t know it would blossom into a $100 million meme. Every day at 7:14pm ET, Bellekom’s bot publishes the value of 10,000 bitcoins—what Hanyecz paid for those two pizza pies in 2010—to Twitter using current prices. “The bot was…