The Story Behind Two $300 Million Pizzas is a Lesson in Humility for Us All
(Technology + Modern History, 6 Min Read, Repeat)
David Dunning is one of the two psychologists behind the Dunning-Kruger effect. He often asks people a question:
“Are you vaguely embarrassed by things you did 5 or 10 years ago?”
And he follows up with:
“If you are, that means good, you’re evolving, you’re improving.”
The idea behind this thought lies in self-reflection. The whimsical ability of our mind to change the way we see the world, and more importantly — how we see ourselves.
Instead of blaming the world for its erratic wackiness, reflection allows us to take control of our minds and perceptions. It lets us live with past mistakes and shows us we are growing as a person.
But it’s not easy, and many people don’t engage in this internal battle of viewpoints. Maybe you find yourself leaning more one way than the other when it comes to self-reflection. You practice it or you don’t.
But ask yourself, how reflective would you be if you lost out on a $650 million dollar fortune you literally had in your possession?
Hitting the Jackpot
Now imagine this. You’re a techie in your 20s. You develop software both as a passion and as a profession.
One day you read about this newfangled online structural data storage system. You think it’s nothing more than a pseudo-thought experiment. You decide to see if you can help improve the system. You find out your computer’s GPU can actually improve the efficiency of the open-source platform quite substantially.
You sit down, develop a program, and get it running. A short time later, you have 10,000 freshly minted digital doodads.
But you have a problem — there’s no place you can use them!
And even then, they’re only “worth” about $0.041 each. Your mindset is still in the enchantment phase of the thought experiment. You’re not even considering where the technology might be 10 years down the road. You just want to see if the experiment works.
A question begins to gnaw at your brain mush:
Can I exchange this digital coin for real-life goods?
Curious, you try posting an offer on Reddit:
“I’ll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas, like maybe two large ones so I have some left over for the next day...”
Someone accepts the offer.
You and your kids enjoy two delightfully delicious Papa John’s pizzas worth about $41 USD.
You sleep contentedly off a cheesy, pepperoni-ish meat pie paid for out of curiosity and a bit of fun puzzle-solving.
Your name is Laszlo Hanyecz. 11 years later, you realize those pizzas would have been bought for the equivalent of $650,000,000 USD.
A New Kind of FOMO
I can’t imagine how it must feel walking around life having directly missed out on $650,000,000 smackaroonies.
And not just the kind of FOMO story where ‘My cousin once told me about this up and coming investment that later became Pornhub and dammit I missed the ride!’
No. This is different.
He literally had the money in the first place. He owned something. Then sold it — for 2 damn pizzas of all things! Insane.
Just for perspective, if those pizzas had been made of a pure gem-quality diamond, it would be worth roughly the same today.
But they weren’t. Those pizzas were not made of diamonds. They were made of industrialized doughy deliciousness with sprinkled seasoning of future regret.
Not diamonds.
But how should he react? The story is true and the man isn’t dead yet. In fact, he seems perfectly happy.
It’s All About Perspective
A famous writer looks back on his early work and scrunches her face in disgust. A modern-day Leonardo da Vinci pulls up his first portrait and laughs in embarrassment. A Michelin star deli chef reads his first honest review of his sandwiches and laughs.
He then proceeds to make the best damn PB&T one could ever hope to taste.
All of these are examples of growth. These mythical artists constantly seek to improve, and somewhere along the way, they realized the best path to do that is through self-reflection.
Only by knowing we made a mistake can we hope to not repeat it. And only by taking the time to find those mistakes, can we hope to know of them.
Laszlo’s Hierarchy of Needs
Laszlo Hanyecz could’ve easily gone insane from his actions.
His life story could create an entirely new category of FOMO. Something far worse than your plain old everyday type of ‘Oh no, I need to buy that egregiously overpriced pumpkin spiced latte before October is over’ type of FOMO.
This had the potential to be life-ruining. The rumination, regret, wondering, and contemplation of ‘what could have been’ would very well destroy many of us.
But Laszlo didn’t let that happen to him. He chose to reflect and change his perspective. He went mindful on that b*tch and reshaped how he viewed his place in the world.
He reflected on the objectivity of the moment.
“I wanted to do the pizza thing because to me it was free pizza.”
He searched for the benefits it gave him, and not the lost opportunity.
“I got pizza for contributing to an open-source project. Usually hobbies are a time sink and money sink, and in this case, my hobby bought me dinner.”
He made a conscious decision to look at it with a lens of gratitude rather than pain.
“I think that it’s great that I got to be part of the early history of Bitcoin in that way.”
and
“I’d like to think that what I did helped. But I think if it wasn’t me, somebody else would have come along.”
The fact he didn’t go AWOL on the world after losing out on that much money is a lesson for us all.
$650 million in exchange for 2 pizzas, with an extra side of extreme humbleness and humility.
Living with Pizzaz
The pizza-for-bitcoin exchange that day is now considered the first concrete example of a transaction using bitcoin. The huge community surrounding the iconic coin has even made it a special annual holiday.
But instead of calling it a bizarre internet demon like ‘PizzaGate’, they simply called it Bitcoin Pizza Day.
There’s even a website dedicated to tracking his fateful purchase as if it were an index fund. It’s aptly named the Bitcoin Pizza Index, and it’s worth a quick click.
The tongue-in-cheek holiday has led to annual charity events in the name of Laszlo’s actions.
A group of people contributing to an NFT called PizzaDAO held “a global bake” sale this year. They raised over $1 million by selling digital pizza art tokens to help people around the world suffering from the pandemic.
And by help, they meant feeding them.
The amusing offer apparently went out to pizzerias on 6 different continents to help throw the largest pizza party in history, ostensibly to support those suffering financially (and foodily) from COVID.
As for Laszlo, he’s still programming in Florida and set up a Twitter account a while ago.
His bio reads:
“I am the person who bought the 10000 btc pizza 8 years ago. I am poor now. Feel free to donate any amount of btc.”
Followed by a long hash denoting his bitcoin wallet address.
I suppose it just goes to show in extreme acts of humbleness, even a programmatic Witcher doesn’t mind having a few bitcoins tossed to him.
J. J. Pryor
Hit the heart/comment/share button for free virtual hugs from yours truly!
Header Image Credit: Bitcoinwiki.org
“The story is true and the man isn’t dead yet. In fact, he seems perfectly happy.”
I love the moral of this story. On reflection there is a lot that Laszlo has gained here. (1) He is at peace without the burden, fear and responsibilities of that money he lost. (2) His story has stimulated others in action around the world to feed the poor (3) Those who do not reflect and think that by holding on they will grow richer are poor in reality.
This story reflects with many of us around the world. We buy shares, property, gold, antiques etc - mainly for security and sell at a profit or at least realise what we put in. After selling the market shoots up, but it brings no regrets for those who reflect. They are still happy with their decision. Others hurt - and that is stupidity.