Pizza holiday. How is this related to bitcoin and 18 billion rubles

On May 18, 2010, developer Laszlo Heinitz wrote on the BitcoinTalk forum that he was willing to pay 10,000 BTC if someone ordered him 2 pizzas. Nobody answered the first call, so Laszlo updated the post on May 21, and the next day, student Jeremy Stardivent ordered 2 mushroom pizzas for him at Papa John's.

Stardivent also did not become a millionaire: he spent the bitcoins received for pizza with a girl on a trip to America.

But there is more to Heinitz's story than this transaction, even as his legendary pizza purchase eclipsed his other accomplishments in the bitcoin space.

Programmer Laszlo Heinitz got acquainted with bitcoin at the end of 2009 and before getting involved in mining, he participated in the work on the first release of Bitcoin Core for MacOS. In May 2010, Heinitz first introduced GPU mining to the community, which he viewed as an experiment.

At that time, bitcoin mining was carried out only at the expense of central processing units (CPU). No one thought of more efficient ways to produce a hash.

Heinitz decided that video cards that provide color and graphics for monitors are more efficient than central processing units and are great for use in bitcoin mining. The opening of the programmer turned out to be very promising. The hashing power has been increased by 10 times.

However, the creator of bitcoin reacted to the discovery without much enthusiasm. After Heinitz shared the GPU mining code with Satoshi Nakamoto, he considered it too advanced for bitcoin.

After that, Heinitz withdrew from promoting his idea. However, the developer's invention began to develop. Shortly after Heinitz posted his code on the Bitcointalk open forum, other members of the community took advantage of it to create their own versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Later, the programmer joked that he would have been better off being greedy and keeping the code a secret.

As a result, Laszlo gave us not only Bitcoin Core for macOS, GPU mining, but also a huge number of pizza memes. They may not be as significant as Heinitz's other contributions to bitcoin, but they make every May 22nd a memorable one.

Every year more and more people and companies celebrate Bitcoin Pizza Day by throwing parties, announcing contests and online sweepstakes, issuing pizza tokens and NFTs with cryptopizza.

In honor of this holiday, the Papa John's pizzeria chain gave away 10,000 slices of pizza for free. NFT marketplaces offer collections of drawings, photos, and other bitcoin pizza day tokens.

In online stores you can see a large number of products on the theme of the holiday. For example, you can easily find a T-shirt or a cup with a beautiful inscription and an image of a delicious piece.

Many crypto platforms announce contests and giveaways of any holiday-related bonuses. The most popular prize on this day, of course, is a free pizza. And on some sites, you can even win a monthly "subscription" to a free pizza. Usually, this requires a witty answer to some question, come up with a new meme, or, for example, most accurately guess the bitcoin rate at the beginning of May 22.

Not only lovers of delicious food participate in the competitions, but also pizzaiolo from all over the world. Last year, one of the major crypto exchanges was raffling off $20,000 among 20 winners in a baker's contest and $50 each among novice bakers. A prerequisite was to bake the “correct” bitcoin pizza using the right ingredients.

Pizza DAO, a decentralized blockchain project seeking to connect the global community of pizza fans with the technological potential of Web3, is celebrating Bitcoin Pizza Sunday in authentic style this year.

On Sunday, the project will host commemorative events in 100 pizzerias in more than 75 countries, including the United States, Argentina, South Korea, Ethiopia, Australia, Canada, the UK and others.

Along with the NFT giveaway and charity campaign, the events will attract a number of crypto enthusiasts, including 13-time world champion pizza maker Tony Gemignani, Seth Green, Steve Aoki, the Dogecoin team, and more.

Bitcoin Pizza Day has been a regular cultural event on the crypto calendar since 2017, when the story of the infamous transaction from the blockchain archives became famous.

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