What is “bitcoin pizza day” and when?
SW: Bitcoin Pizza Day is celebrated annually on May 22. On May 22, 2010, an early adopter of bitcoin, a Florida man named Laszlo Hanyecz, bought two Papa Johns pizzas and used 10,000 bitcoins to buy them. At the time, the purchase was equivalent to approximately 40 USD, at the current conversion rate, 10,000 bitcoins are worth approximately 388 million USD (or approximately 340 million euros)! Laszlo is regularly asked about this purchase and he constantly says he has “no regrets” – he mined these bitcoins and has no idea they would go up in value at such a phenomenal rate. The purchase was made when Laszlo posted a message on a crypto board asking if anyone would buy him two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins – it was Jeremy Sturdivant, a college student in California, who accepted the offer and ordered Papa John’s pizza for him. Unfortunately, Jeremy also lost and spent the full 10,000 bitcoins later that year on travel. It was the world’s first bitcoin payment for real goods. To be nice to Laszlo, the pizzas he received were actually large, so it wasn’t such a bad deal after all!
I heard of Bitcoin Cash, is it the same as Bitcoin?
SW: Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) are 2 different crypto currencies. The Bitcoin website is www.bitcoin.org and the Bitcoin Cash website is www.bitcoin.com
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, launched in 2009 and Bitcoin Cash was created on August 1, 2017 through what is known as a hard fork – this happens when a group of individuals agree to create a new crypto- currency and a new blockchain is created. .
Since its inception, many improvements have been made to the original bitcoin and they are often debated at length before they are implemented. Bitcoin has suffered from scaling issues since day one, for example, even today it can only handle around 7 transactions per second [compare this to the Visa/Mastercard networks which currently process around 1,700 transactions per second]. Bitcoin Cash solved this scaling problem by creating a larger block size, bitcoin block size is 1 Meg and Bitcoin Cash started life at 8 Meg. [In May 2018 BitCoin Cash expanded its blocksize again raising it to 32 Meg]. The creation of BitCoin Cash was not a friendly time, as techs argued the pros/cons of keeping the block size at 1 Meg – this time is now called Block Wars.
Both cryptocurrencies exist independently of each other and bitcoin relies on something called the “Lightning Network to scale” – this creates a second layer on top of bitcoin where transaction speeds are almost instantaneous and the fees are almost zero. It has been predicted that the “Lightning Network” will be able to handle up to 15 million transactions per second, although adoption has been slow. Meanwhile, some Bitcoin Cash proponents have switched to Bitcoin SV (BSV) – a Bitcoin Cash hard drive that initially had a block size of 128 Meg and has since expanded to 2,000 Meg [2 Gig] – moreover the size of our hard drives is increasing!
Whether you’re an interested newcomer or looking for specific technical help and support with all things cryptocurrency, we’re here to help.
Just send your email to [email protected] and we’ll publish a selection of questions and answers in future editions and online.
It should be noted that neither The Portugal News nor Stephen Whitelaw will provide financial advice regarding crypto.
Comments are closed.