This article is intended as a bit of light hearted reading and some fun Crypto facts for you to tell all your friends about :-)
The most expensive Pizza purchase
On May 22, 2010 Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoins for two delivered Papa John’s pizzas. Hanyecz, a Hungarian developer, was really hungry (sorry about the pun!), and had bitcoins to spare, so he used the bitcointalk forums to find a user to make the $35 delivery order for him in exchange for 10,000 bitcoins.
In 2010 the value of one bitcoin was already rising. Estimates put the value of each pizza anywhere between $25 to $300 per pizza.
By 2011 bitcoin had increased in value making the two pizzas worth $10,000.
In current day terms, Hanyecz would have spent over 35 million dollars to purchase one pizza.
I hope that the person who bought the Pizza's for Hanyecz HODL'd them!
Hanyecz still remains cool to this day about spending this amount of Bitcoin on pizza and is quoted as saying to the NY Times “It wasn’t like bitcoins had any value back then, so the idea of trading them for a pizza was incredibly cool”.
Bitcoin Network computing power
When you combine all the world's computing power that is mining Bitcoin it is about 10,000 times more powerful than the top 500 supercomputers in the world.
And the energy it takes to run all those computers mining Bitcoin is larger than the amount of energy that Argentina uses! Yes, more energy is spent on mining Bitcoin around the world than the energy consumption of a whole country!
Russia has a hydro-electric dam built purely for the purpose of generating renewable electricity for it's on-site Crypto mining operation. And being "very" cold outside means that less power is spent on cooling down the industrial mining rigs. Well done EN+ !
Crypto Currencies have been banned in a number of countries
Crypto is becoming the norm very quickly around the world, but there are still places they are not accepted. These include : Algeria, Bolivia, Bangladesh, Nepal, Morocco, North Macedonia, Kyrgyzstan, Cambodia, and Ecuador.
I'm not sure how a full ban works on Crypto currency - hiding behind a VPN and having a non-governmental decentralised Crypto currency should mean people can "own" Crypto - but I guess that trading and buying/selling goods within these countries is definately a no-no.
The biggest Miner of Crypto is...
China. This might not come as a surprise to some, but it has beaten Russia and the US for mining crypto currencies.
What surprised me was the scale that China was ahead. Between September 2019 to April 2020 China produced 71.7% of the world’s hashrate for bitcoin (source: Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance).
There is only a finite amount of Bitcoin
Yes, there is only a finite amount of Bitcoin that will ever exist.
There are currently c. 18.5-19 million bitcoins in existence
There will only ever be 21million Bitcoin. Not a Satoshi more!
It is estimated that the last Bitcoin will have been mined in the year 2140. It will become harder and harder to mine Bitcoin as we approach this date.
But the price of Bitcoin is therefore likely to increase the closer we get to this date as miners still want to be paid for running transactions on the network by finding block rewards - and then the currency will hopefully stabalise (rather than crash).
You may or may not have known some or all of the facts above, but I hope that this was a fun read for you all.
