Papa John's Celebrates 'Bitcoin Pizza Day' - as Price of Bitcoin Drops to $38,240 (msn.com) 119
Business Insider re-visits the story of why May 22nd is celebrated as "Bitcoin Pizza Day."
Exactly 11 years ago today, a software programmer from Florida, Laszlo Hanyecz, became well known in the crypto world after trading 10,000 bitcoins for two Papa John's pizzas. In honor of that purchase, the date is now celebrated in the crypto calendar as "Bitcoin Pizza Day."
"It wasn't like bitcoins had any value back then, so the idea of trading them for a pizza was incredibly cool," Hanyecz said in an interview with the New York Times in 2013... In 2018, he gave an interview to Cointelegraph. He said: "You know, I don't regret it. I think that it's great that I got to be part of the early history of bitcoin in that way, and people know about the pizza and it's an interesting story because everybody can kind of relate to that and be [like] - "Oh my God, you spent all of that money!"
So today Papa John's is giving away 10,000 slices of pizza to commemorate their place in history, another Business Insider article reports. Justin Falciola, SVP, chief insights & technology officer, tells them that "Celebrating National Bitcoin Pizza Day felt like a natural extension of Papa John's historical tie to the bitcoin story... It's great for consumer brands to show that they're aware of trends and emerging technologies. The benefit to this is meeting consumers where they are and continuing to build a meaningful connection."
The link between pizza and bitcoin was further observed earlier in the week when crypto investor Anthony Pompliano launched a bitcoin-themed pizza service in the US that won't accept the digital asset as payment. As Insider's Shalini Nagarajan reported, the service will partner with independent pizzerias in 10 cities across the US, but won't accept bitcoin payments. All proceeds will go towards supporting research and development of bitcoin, Pompliano said.
The article also points out that "Earlier this week, the crypto market lost 47% of its value in just seven days," and by Friday one bitcoin was worth $37,340.
But another article notes that the 10,000 bitcoins traded for two Papa Johns pizzas would, at one point this year, have been worth $648,950,000.
"It wasn't like bitcoins had any value back then, so the idea of trading them for a pizza was incredibly cool," Hanyecz said in an interview with the New York Times in 2013... In 2018, he gave an interview to Cointelegraph. He said: "You know, I don't regret it. I think that it's great that I got to be part of the early history of bitcoin in that way, and people know about the pizza and it's an interesting story because everybody can kind of relate to that and be [like] - "Oh my God, you spent all of that money!"
So today Papa John's is giving away 10,000 slices of pizza to commemorate their place in history, another Business Insider article reports. Justin Falciola, SVP, chief insights & technology officer, tells them that "Celebrating National Bitcoin Pizza Day felt like a natural extension of Papa John's historical tie to the bitcoin story... It's great for consumer brands to show that they're aware of trends and emerging technologies. The benefit to this is meeting consumers where they are and continuing to build a meaningful connection."
The link between pizza and bitcoin was further observed earlier in the week when crypto investor Anthony Pompliano launched a bitcoin-themed pizza service in the US that won't accept the digital asset as payment. As Insider's Shalini Nagarajan reported, the service will partner with independent pizzerias in 10 cities across the US, but won't accept bitcoin payments. All proceeds will go towards supporting research and development of bitcoin, Pompliano said.
The article also points out that "Earlier this week, the crypto market lost 47% of its value in just seven days," and by Friday one bitcoin was worth $37,340.
But another article notes that the 10,000 bitcoins traded for two Papa Johns pizzas would, at one point this year, have been worth $648,950,000.
No (Score:2)
Trade those coins for some "real" money and you can buy yourself a "real" pizza. Or at least a good one. You own bitcoin, you've got the extra $10 right?
at least they stopped KKK Wednesday. (Score:1)
I heard every one knew Papa John when he showed up. He had fitted sheets!
why don't bitcoin fans promote this angle? (Score:2, Interesting)
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No, because "crypto currency" isn't money, just gambling tokens. It fails each and every test of money. Paying all debts would not erase the need for money, which crypto coins can't meet in any case.
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Funny major governments also keep gold reserves, so don't worry. And gold is still used as money in other parts of the world, you can change the 24k stuff (only slightly alloyed for hardness) for local currency or US dollars on the street
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not true, gold as money is alive and well in Asia. Bought and sold with it myself over there...
Nothing is stopping you from owning real gold.
Re: why don't bitcoin fans promote this angle? (Score:1)
In a sense it does. If you donâ(TM)t understand that, you donâ(TM)t understand economics.
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People use investments as currency all the time. It's what makes anything you can trade a currency, pebbles and shells used to be a currency.
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People use investments as currency all the time. It's what makes anything you can trade a currency, pebbles and shells used to be a currency.
when is the last time you walked into a store and bought something with rare metals or stocks or anything that by definition has a speculative value?
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I'm talking of gold being used as money, *widely* accepted to buy and sell. Baseball cards are not.
Get out of your mom's basement, anon, there is a whole huge world out there of which you are utterly ignorant.
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Um, you should really read past the header. Tip: Papa John's is NOT accepting Bitcoin payments.
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Money is the technology to move wealth across space and time.
So Bitcoin fails horribly on this account considering its volatility.
The quantity of money doesn't matter, what matters is the scarcity.
Quantity absolutely matters. Growing economies need more money unless you want to go into deflation which chokes your growing economy.
Gold was the best money because Gold was the scarcest asset.
Completely wrong. Gold was good because it was malleable (you could split it into equal-sized chunks easily) and chemically inert (didn't degrade). Diamonds, platinum were scarcer but impractical in at least one of these respects, silver was somewhat worse in the other one.
Re:why don't bitcoin fans promote this angle? (Score:5, Insightful)
For a modern, industrialized market economy your definition of money is incorrect. In the market economy, the only purpose of the industry is to turn value into more value through work, by applying work to raw materials and goods to turn them into more valuable goods, realizing the added value on markets. Money is the medium in which that added value realizes itself, has to realize itself.
In an extension to that, the currency gets its value and its purchasing power by how well and how reliably the currency area's industry is able to turn value into more value, to return invested money as more money.
When gold had been found not to be suited for that purpose, the Dollar had to be separated from it. It needed to be separated from gold to continue to function as described above, as the thing that money is and needs to be in an industrialized market economy.
Which – and this is no coincidence – is also the main reason why Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are failing as money and will continue to do so. There is nothing, let alone something even remotely comparable to a whole nation's industry behind those "currencies" that would be able to give them "real" (by the framework conditions of the market economy) value.
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Gold is perfectly suited to be sound money from a theoretical perspective, but Gold is impossible to secure properly at the private person level.
False. There's simply not enough to go around.
The total amount of gold discovered, to this day, was something like 250,000 metric tons.
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So use silver.
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You might want to check your numbers on that too.
As noted by many before, there's good reason why precious metals are no longer used as currency.
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In a market economy, the market tells you whether you've added value or destroyed value, no matter what money you use. The money that is used on that market is, de facto, proper money in terms of the framework conditions of the market economy. In the Soviet Union, there was no market economy.
The income trend after 1971 was not caused by anything currency-related, and much of it happened elsewhere, too, even if it started later elsewhere, because other countries were less technologically advanced. It was a r
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Lol. Gold was one reference for money. Silver was another. Both were used right in the US of A. Others include various gems, glass, aluminum, seashells, rocks, big rocks, big rocks at the bottom of the ocean, letters, letters with crosses on them, cattle, goats, tea, cheese, bottle caps, mobile phone airtime, and hand drawn pictures. To name a few.
Re:why don't bitcoin fans promote this angle? (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably because that angle ignores most of what money does.
Money has four major functions: a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value, and a standard of deferred payment. Only the last is really debt in a classic sense.
People use money as a medium of exchange because it's easier to say "I will trade you $9 for a cheeseburger" than to say "I will trade you this hammer for that cheeseburger and, uhhh, a plate". This does touch on the other functions making the money useful later, but there's no debt angle here
As a unit of account, it's not debt in the usual sense. You put money in a bank account, and you can withdraw it later. Depending on various factors, there may or may not be something like interest involved. Because the normal case is on-demand withdrawal, it's not like a debt, which generally has defined repayment terms.
As a store of value, it's also not debt. You expect its value to be fairly stable over time. To store value, it doesn't matter whether you hold it or deposit it or loan it to someone else; the important part is that you have a fairly good idea what $100 will be worth in a year or ten years.
As a standard of deferred payment, it can function as a way to record and define debts. However, this really hinges on the other functions holding true: If it's not a medium of exchange, it is also poor as a standard of deferred payment. If it's not a good store of value, there is a lot of risk in using it for deferred payments.
Bitcoin ends up being fairly poor at the first, third and fourth of those purposes. It's a good unit of account, but it's hard to use for trade, it's a terribly unpredictable store of value, and this makes it lousy as a standard of deferred payment. (Imagine if the two Bitcoin pizzas were traded against 10,000 BTC, payable ten years after the exchange!)
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LOL @ Pyrite Pete the 'bitcoin insider' (Score:3)
Cantillon Effect: wealth of top 10% grew at same rate as money supply, and bottom 50% didn’t grow at all
Of course, that can't happen with bitcoin. Because all the poor people will just buy up all the ASIC bitcoin miners [google.com] and create the same number of coins as the rich.
Right?...
Can the poor even pay the electricity cost to run them though?
Or did you mean speculating on the fluctuating price of bitcoins.
Because poor people also have just as much free cashflow as the rich to do that just as well..
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You don't need a mining license. Mining Bitcoin is open to everyone; Bitcoin is permission-less.
Yes, all you need is enough money...
Rich get richer.
It's almost as if a select group of people get the profits before anyone else. Kind of like an insider isn't it.
Mined gold is often hedged. [google.com] Effectively sold before it's even mined. As the risk of adverse price changes is often too high to make it worthwhile.
Bitcoin would never fluctuate like that would it?
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This is how the real economy operates, you can't produce something from nothing.
Write a book. Sing a song.
Give handjobs behind the local dumpster.
Another great way to produce something from nothing is to create a popular crypto token.
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That's not going to happen. The only reason Bitcoin goes up in value is that, when you buy one, in the future you'll be able to find somebody to sell it to who will be willing to pay more than you bought it.
Why is a Bitcoin worth $32,500 (at the time I am writing this)? Because, if I have got one and I put it up for sale,
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Bitcoin lost $1,000 (or 3% of its value) in the time it took me to write the last two paragraphs of that post. Volatility is the word.
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People use money as a medium of exchange because it's easier to say "I will trade you $9 for a cheeseburger" than to say "I will trade you this hammer for that cheeseburger and, uhhh, a plate". This does touch on the other functions making the money useful later, but there's no debt angle here
This is absolutely false. If I give you $9 in exchange for a cheeseburger, I have a cheeseburger and you have a few bits of paper with numbers on them. Even worse: if I pay with a credit card, I have a cheeseburger and you have nothing, but some number in a database somewhere has increased by 9.
When I give you money (or fiat currency, at least), I am really just giving you an IOU. What makes it useful as a medium of exchange is that it is an IOU that you can reuse to obtain goods from other people.
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If cash -- or fiat currency in general -- is an IOU, who is the "I", what is owed, and when is it due? You can't go to Fort Knox and demand an exchange of dollar bills for silver or gold bullion.
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You can't go to Fort Knox and demand an exchange of dollar bills for silver or gold bullion.
Plenty of places will sell you gold or silver, or anything else for you dollar bills
This will get you started cash for gold [google.com]
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Yes, as I said, it's a convenient medium of exchange. Those places don't owe you anything. A wallet full of cash doesn't obligate them to trade with you. Money is not a IOU.
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You are right I didn't read clearly enough. My bad. Money isn't an IOU.
That said. If anything legally will obligate them to trade with you. Money would be that thing.
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The whole money as debt thing, where if everyone paid off all debts, there would be no money left in circulation. Crypto currency could finally be a way to solve that mess.
The "mess" you are referring to is basically the backbone of the economy. Without lending, entire industries would collapse. Debt is a feature of financial systems, not a bug.
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Coins in circulation throughout the U.S. included Russian kopecks, Dutch rix-dollars, and French and English coins. The Spanish real was commonly used throughout the United States in the early to mid 19th century...
Prior to 1861, all paper money was issued by private or State Banks, often with little funding available. The notes could be redeemed for coins at the above-board banks, but notes issued by dishonest banks, called Wildcat banks, were worth little or nothing. In 1863, National Bank notes replaced State notes.
Note that State Bank Notes were essentially a form of circulating debt. If all debt were eliminated, these new debts would be issued to help make the monetary supply large enough to address the actual amount of economic activity
Ironically, Bitcoin would be a more viable competitor if the dollar itself became deflationary and fo
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Because BTC, like pretty much every other cryptocurrency out there, is useless as currency.
BTC, by design is a) deflationary and b) makes it incredibly easy for existing currency to be lost forever. With those two, you'd be insane to buy anything with BTC today as it, unless it crashes horribly, will literally buy you more of the same tomorrow.
This is the reason why people treat cryptocurrencies as speculative assets instead of, you know, money.
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The whole money as debt thing, where if everyone paid off all debts, there would be no money left in circulation.
There would also be no debts which would in turn cause the entire economy to stop dead. Oh right until you need to eat at which point you will trade a debt for produce which in turn gets traded for produce which in turn gets traded for logistics and wages, which in turn gets traded for labour on a farm...
There's no economic scenario where it is possible to remove a currency from circulation while debt remains. There's no economic scenario where debt can be eliminated without the complete extinction of our s
cherry pick your starting point (Score:3, Interesting)
If you bought bitcoin any time in the last three months, you'd be one sad motherfucker. And the plunge is ongoing...
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You will write the same kind of message when Bitcoin will drop from $120,000 to $100,000.
Bitcoin is inevitable, because you can't attack it!
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attack? it flops without warning on its own. Governments are bringing down the hammer, not good thing for gaming token with no intrinsic value.
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China banning crypto didn't help, but what will finally kill it off is msjor governments realizing that the only way to stop the ransomware juggernaut is to prevent exchanges between crypto and national currencies. At this point if it is possible to kill exchanges, they will do so.
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The exchanges are very practical but the exchanges are a security and a privacy risk that could be avoided with p2p exchanges.
You're clearly missing the point that the activity of exchanging between crypto and fiat currency, by its very nature, requires a centralized trusted entity.
The oft-lauded decentralization aspect of cryptocurrency is a farce. It is only the blockchain network itself that is P2P, to get any real value in or out of it still requires conducting trade through a trustworthy entity.
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Even the blockchain network is at risk once more than 50% is controllable by a single entity. Right now, 65 % of the mining is done in China by a few large pools.
Doesn't seem very decentralised to me, since the govornment has absolute control of all it's citizens, corporations and any other entities there.
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Make trading in crypto illegal, with a 10 year jail term for doing so. You'll immediately see all the speculators leave the market, and the price will drop to pennies. You don't need to make it physically impossible, you just need to make it illegal so the vast majority won't do it.
Re:cherry pick your starting point (Score:4, Insightful)
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People desire alcohol. Nobody has that big a hangup around an alternate currency attempt that fails badly at actually being a currency. You might see drug dealers still use it, and some related crimes. But people have no inherent use for crypto like they do alcohol.
Re: cherry pick your starting point (Score:2)
In Venezuela, ex-USSR states and many African countries, Bitcoin and other altcoins are the primary method of payment because they donâ(TM)t have a currency thatâ(TM)s worth anything. Once the dollar starts devaluation due to bad government policy (which it has started to do precipitously in the last 2-3 months), Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency will be traded instead.
There is no intrinsic value to gold or Bitcoin or dollars other than the ones we assign to it and that assignment is the amount of
How about "give employees healthcare day" (Score:3, Interesting)
To this day whenever I hear the words "Papa Johns" that's my first thought.
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To this day whenever I hear the words "Papa Johns" that's my first thought.
Mine's that the founder was a victim of cancel culture. Maybe I'm getting old, but I 'member when people would just apologize for being a giant douche nozzle and that was the end of it.
Bitcoin pizza day (Score:1)
It should be a reminder that Bitcoins are only worth what someone is willing to give you for them. In this case, 10,000 Bitcoins was worth two mediocre pizzas. There's no technical reason that couldn't happen again. My bet would be on some other coin becoming dominant. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna update my MySpace page, then go pick up a movie from Blockbuster..
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Nah, you can rent it for the weekend for .0000001 bitcoins. 10K is the late fee.
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Everything is only worth what someone is willing to give you for them. Classic Twilight Zone, a sip of water cost one gold bar!
Cue the slashdot bitcoin hate (Score:4, Insightful)
$0.10 - 2010 - Bitcoin is too volatile to be a useful currency and will never hit $1.
$1 - 2011 - Deflationary currencies are doomed to failure.
$10 - Later in 2011- Bitcoin is like tulip-mania in Holland. This massive bubble will pop soon!
$100 - 2013 - Bitcoin is a massive ponzi scheme! A lot of people will get hurt!
$1,000 - 2014 - The Mt. Gox hack is the end of Bitcoin. It will never recover.
$10,000 - 2017 - Bitcoin is only used by criminals like the Silk Road and will never be taken seriously!
$60,000 - 2021 - Bitcoin's Proof of Work is too energy intensive for our Carbon free future!
I think it's high time to admit that Slashdot was wrong about Bitcoin every step of the way. This has been the largest transfer of wealth from Big Finance to geeks like you and me in the history of the world. From the sound of it, most of yall missed out. You guys continue to parrot the FUD talking points provided by Big Finance, Big Government, and their lackeys in the media. If you took a couple hours to read the whitepaper, and have a basic understanding of finance, you would understand why you were so incredibly wrong.
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This has been the largest transfer of wealth from Big Finance to geeks like you and me in the history of the world.
Sorry, you're fucking delusional. Think what you may about why cryptocurrencies exploded over the last couple years, they're still less than a drop in the bucket of global finances. Their market cap is insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
This is the reason why someone selling or buying a couple tens of thousands of BTC can drop it's dollar value by 25% in hours.
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The recent loss of 1/3rd of its value doesn't prove this true?
Is it even a currency or just an investment? Use for trade is still quite limited for day-to-day living
See volatility and the sudden rise of joke crypto as proof of a bubble.
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you're hilarious, what's your excuse for it being $59K two weeks ago and augering into ground since? Now $32.5K and plunging like a meteor....
We're not wrong, it's gambling and gaming token only, that was tulip mania II and nothing more. Bitcoin fails all the tests of being money.
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what's your excuse for it being $59K two weeks ago and augering into ground since?.
Me, I am the killer of all good things.
I had a good house, and then I tried some home improvements. A few weeks later, They needed redoing.
I had a good bike, and then I attempted an electric conversion. A few weeks later, I have a fried battery.
About a month ago, I had a good few hundred dollars which I dipped into various crypto currencies....
Can be currency, but dangerous store of value (Score:1)
Bitcoin is a massive ponzi scheme! A lot of people will get hurt!.
The fact that the submitted headline says $38k, and the price as I type this is below $33k means that some people probably have got hurt at this point.
It's not really the fault of Bitcoin though, a huge problem is just like anything you can put money into the whole market is leveraged out the wazoo. We are right around the point where a lot of margin calls for bitcoin leveraged to buy more bitcoin, is about to be called for people that did
Re: Cue the slashdot bitcoin hate (Score:2)
Now, you think that money is being transferred from the man who just got it stuck to him, but the transactions in the very recent past above 40, 50, 60k all have the buying party a a severe loss today. Some of those people are left holding the
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Why wouldn't people hate something that chews up ridiculous amounts of energy and computing resources to produce literally nothing other than propping up a pyramid scheme?
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>by bitcoinhater
Thanks, never selling.
its very good (Score:1)
Hopefully that guy still has a lot of Bitcoin (Score:2)