A guy who made a fortune by selling two pizzas for Bitcoin, now valued at more than USD 365 million, has revealed that he squandered his staggering profits. It said in the article that he would be able to get 10,000 bitcoins, which valued at roughly USD 41 at the time, in return for delivering two huge pizzas to a resident of Florida. Before we move any further in this guide, make sure to use a network that is stable and join the bitcoin community to learn from the best about bitcoin trading.

Even though he was just 19, Sturdivant signed a contract that might have earned him a multi-millionaire today. Instead, he used his bitcoin, which he had no idea how valuable it would become, to pay for business expenditures while on a business trip.

Bitcoin had just been around for a year and was selling for less than a cent. The excitement around the world’s first cryptocurrency was still mostly contained to the baby hobbyist forum Bitcointalk, which had only been around for half a year at the time. Old-timers filled with passion discussed economic theory, technical understanding, and the new cryptographic beast created by Satoshi Nakamoto in this setting.

Perhaps it was for this reason that Laszlo Hanyecz thought it was time to write history. On May 18, 2010, a Bitcoin Core developer posted a request on the Bitcointalk forum, asking for help in preparing “[two huge] pizzas yourself and delivering them to my home or ordering them from a delivery business.” He promised 10,000 BTC in exchange for the service, and he eventually received his wish, but it took four days.

However, there is more to Hanyecz’s tale than this transaction, even though the famed pizza purchase has eclipsed his other accomplishments in the Bitcoin world too far. Despite the acquisition, the developer is doing rather well, mainly owing to his second (and much more significant) contribution to Bitcoin’s development: GPU mining (graphics processing unit mining).

A member of Bitcoin’s inaugural batch of contributors, the software engineer, who exposed the cryptocurrency in late 2009, was a pioneer in bitcoin mining. “I’d been working on [bitcoin], correcting bugs and stuff like that,” Hanyecz said in his characteristically humble manner. He made “small” contributions to the Bitcoin Core project, including developing and deploying the first macOS Bitcoin Core version.

They also entail reshaping the mining industry’s physical environment. In May 2010, Hanyecz introduced the community to GPU mining, which he regarded as a way of contributing to something that was still very much in the early stages of development and not yet considered a movement. When he first joined Bitcointalk, he recalls that there weren’t many people there. “There were 50 to 100 individuals there, maybe more.” I received an email that said something along the lines of “Hey, do you want to contribute to an open-source project?”

Bitcoin mining was limited to CPUs at the time, which are the processors that power personal computers. No one had come up with a more efficient method of producing hashes before. In his quest to increase this efficiency, Hanyecz stated that he was “not entirely aware of how quickly [the mining] difficulty changed” (because no one had created a miner powerful enough to test this mechanism truly). Nonetheless, he meditated on generating more hashes more rapidly to derive more excellent value from the network in the future.

It is what inspired him to develop a mining algorithm that uses graphics processing units (GPUs). In his words, “GPUs’ strength is that they can handle a large number of tasks in parallel, but they have to be extremely basic tasks and they have to be the same thing.” In other words, you may add anywhere from ten to one thousand distinct integers simultaneously. A general-purpose, regular-functioning CPU, on the other hand, is far more versatile. It is capable of a great deal, but it must do each task one at a time. “The mining challenge was a wonderful fit for graphics processing units.”

His finding proved to be profitable. A tenfold boost in hash power achieves utilizing a Macbook Pro from 2010 as a platform! However, his discovery did not go over well with the father of cryptography. He described Satoshi as being “a little at arm’s length” during those early days. Still, when he shared the GPU mining code with the author, Satoshi expressed his dissatisfaction with it, stating that it was too sophisticated for Bitcoin’s current level of development.

“A major draw for new users is the fact that everyone with a computer may earn some free coins,” Satoshi said in an email to Hanyecz. “This is a great appeal for new users.” “GPUs would prematurely restrict the incentive to just those who could afford the most expensive GPU hardware.” The inevitable outcome will be that GPU computing clusters will ultimately consume all of the coins created, but I don’t want to expedite that day.” Hanyecz has maintained his bullish attitude even though bitcoin has rocketed beyond all-time high after all-time high throughout the last few years. To him, it is still a recreational activity rather than a professional one.