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This is your annual reminder that Bitcoin pizza day may well have been a consequence of Satoshi admonishing Laszlo over accumulating so many BTC from his experiments with GPU mining
In April 2009 Laszlo wrote to Satoshi and told him he was planning to GPU mine. Satoshi wrote back and emphasized that the growth of BTC relied on dispersion of the coins. Full text here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/36vnmr/heres_what_satoshi_wrote_to_the_man_responsible/
I'm speculating, but it's entirely possible that a guilt-ridden Laszlo decided to disgorge some of his GPU-mined BTC by making a series of pizza transactions (he is believed to have done it 8 times)
The timing seems to work out too. The first real burst of GPU mining took place in July 2010, but hashrate started climbing in February, so Laszlo's claimed timeline is consistent with the difficulty history
https://coinmetrics.io/charts/#assets=btc_log=false_left=DiffMean_right=HashRate_zoom=1232937865199.0657,1277509059056.619
https://coinmetrics.io/charts/#assets=btc_log=false_left=DiffMean_right=HashRate_zoom=1232937865199.0657,1277509059056.619
Basically, we know Laszlo was aware that GPU mining in early 2010 was contrary to Satoshi's wishes, and so it's entirely possible that he knew the pizza transactions would be costly, but he did it anyway, to make sure BTC was as well distributed as possible.
If this is true, and it seems like it might be (would love confirmation from Laszlo), the narrative flips from "silly early bitcoiner spends ~$800m on pizza" to "self-sacrificial early miner forsakes wealth for the glory of Bitcoin"
So today, I want to celebrate Laszlo, not for his naivete, but for his foresight and sacrifice. Here's to you, Laszlo!
