Bitcoin Believers

If you can understand pizza and poker, you can understand Bitcoin – and here's why you should.

If you can understand pizza and poker, you can understand Bitcoin – and David Noble believes you should. (Illustration by Andrew Colin Beck for UConn)

If you can understand pizza and poker, you can understand Bitcoin – and David Noble believes you should. (Illustration by Andrew Colin Beck for UConn)

On May 22, 2010, Floridian Laszlo Hanyecz ordered two pizzas from Domino’s. It’s not the kind of thing that usually makes the history books. Yet his name goes on a list that includes Max Pruss, the captain of the Hindenburg, and Fred Kaps, the magician who followed The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show – unfortunate men who will forever be remembered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Laszlo Hanyecz’s mistake was to buy the pizzas with bitcoins, 10,000 of them, a value of about $41, the first recorded bitcoin purchase. Had he held on to his bitcoins for a few more years, he could have sold them for $100,000,000. Or bought 6,253,909 large pepperoni pizzas.

It is stories like this that suggest bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies may have once been silly, but now they matter.

To read the rest of the story, go to magazine.uconn.edu.