Quote from: Raize on March 24, 2017, 01:21:12 AM

Quote from: QuestionAuthority on March 23, 2017, 10:21:06 PM

Quote from: European Central Bank on March 23, 2017, 10:16:25 PM

Quote from: QuestionAuthority on March 23, 2017, 09:59:49 PM

Not everyone was stupid enough to buy a pizza with thousands of mined bitcoins.

that's a transaction that deserves everyone's respect. we might not be here if it hadn't happened.

Ok, maybe, but it was also a transaction made by someone that never believed bitcoin would be worth very much. Just like all the 50 btc VIP forum members. Either that or all the VIP members really did want to spend $50,000 to impress a bunch of strangers.

Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. That's not true for everyone, and even laszlo possibly had an inkling of an ulterior motive with his purchase. Did you ever read laszlo's account of Satoshi's response to him having started GPU mining? Here's a link.

Basically, laszlo had mined far more than the 10k coin using a GPU. Satoshi encouraged him that a more widespread adoption would help grow the network and adoption rates. Here's what he said (we don't really have proof this was Satoshi, but laszlo didn't really have reason to make it up)

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A big attraction to new users is that anyone with a computer can generate some free coins. When there are 5000 users, that incentive may fade, but for now it's still true.

GPUs would prematurely limit the incentive to only those with high end GPU hardware. It's inevitable that GPU compute clusters will eventually hog all the generated coins, but I don't want to hasten that day. If the difficulty gets really high, that increases the value of each coin in a way since the supply becomes more limited. The supply is the same: 50 coins every 10 minutes.

But GPUs are much less evenly distributed, so the generated coins only go towards rewarding 20% of the people for joining the network instead of 100%.

I don't mean to sound like a socialist, I don't care if wealth is concentrated, but for now, we get more growth by giving that money to 100% of the people than giving it to 20%. Also, the longer we can delay the GPU arms race, the more mature the OpenCL libraries get, and the more people will have OpenCL compatible video cards. If we see from the difficulty factor that someone is using too much GPU, we can certainly pick this OpenCL stuff up again then. Maybe my effort to maintain GPU innocence is running out of time. It's worked out so far.

What laszlo probably saw, that others at the time hadn't really considered, was that doing an actual transaction with the coin might have the effect of gaining wider exposure for the coin, which let him do more pizza trades. So supposing he had a lot of coin, he could set a bunch of it aside for pizza trades to grow adoption, while keeping the rest of it as a stash that would grow over time. As he even would go on to say...

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3-4 years ago there were less than 100 people frequenting this forum, and I was pretty happy to trade 10,000 coins for pizza. I mean people can say I'm stupid, but it was a great deal at the time. I don't think anyone could have known it would take off like this.

He claims he's sold out all of this coins, but he very well may have stashed some away that he holds onto and just tells people its all gone. That's what I would have done had I been lucky enough to be one of the first GPU miners. I mean, imagine all the people that had at least 100 bitcoin when it hit $1000 in 2013. Were they stupid for having sold at least some of it? If you'd asked that question in 2014 or early 2015, the answer would have been a definite "no". But by today's standards was it stupid? Maybe? It's hard to say with the price where it is. Five years from now? Probably, but we're still not sure, network dominance in the cryptocurrency space might be a fleeting prospect.

I get what you're saying, though, it's unlikely that Laszlo repurchased or started GPU farming coin at the $2 bottom in 2011, or at the $160 bottom in early 2015, but how many people are really that good at timing anyway? He had a family and wasn't going to keep GPU mining or FPGA mining and his time was probably better invested elsewhere than paying attention to Bitcoin. Not everyone can spend every waking minute on Bitcoin, after all. I guess my contention is with calling him "stupid", he got what he wanted out of it, can't fault him for that.

I donated 10 BTC to help out the forum in 2012, so I'm an idiot as well, right? Now I don't own a single coin to my name because I spent all $10k worth of that coin I ever owned on the forum... I promise! Grin

I don't think they were stupid. I think they really didn't believe the price would skyrocket so fast. That amounts to not really believing in bitcoin. Someone mentioned just buying more to replace what you spent. If you believed it would grow so fast you should buy as much as you can and as much as you can afford with every penny you have and hold, hold, hold.

Ok, maybe the pizza had this great magical effect. I just believe it was more likely that the slashdot and gawker articles that happened at the same time were the real reason for the meteoric rise. You do know the largest holder of btc was the US government because they took Ross Ulbrich's coin away from him, right. Drug addicts and pushers (with the help of a few online articles) really put bitcoin on the map, not a pizza purchase. I doubt you can find anyone outside the members of this forum that even know the pizza story but everyone at the time heard of Silk Road.