Laszlo Hanyecz, the first BTC pizza purchaser does it again, but this time through a Lightning Network.
By Bhushan Akolkar
Updated
3 mins read
Many of us must be knowing or must have hear about Laszlo Hanyecz – yes, the same man who has been popular for making the first Bitcoin transaction in exchange for any physical item and buying out two pizzas for 10,000 BTC back then in 2010. Now, the same person is once again in the limelight for buying out two more pizzas using the Bitcoin’s Lightning Network.
The Lightning Network is Bitcoin’s most awaited and sought-after scalability project. The Lightning Network is basically a second layer protocol developed atop the Bitcoin’s blockchain network and takes transactions off the chain, thereby expanding the blockchain’s operational abilities by manifold times.
Laszlo Hanyecz has maintained a very low profile and has been very infamous amongst Bitcoin developers. But recently on Feb. 25 Hanyecz posted on the Lightning-dev mailing list wherein he talks about having made a payment using the Lightning Network. Hanyecz wrote that he proved his pizza purchase to the pizza delivery driver by providing the payment hash preimage to the delivery driver.
He said: “In short, I paid bitcoin using the lightning network and he arranged for pizza to be delivered to me. In this trade, my friend is just a middleman that is taking the risk of accepting lightning payments, but it demonstrates the basic premise of how this works for everyday transactions. It could just as well be the pizza shop accepting the payment directly with their own lightning node.”
The first every BTC-pizza transaction took place on May. 22, 2010 and has been well-known as Bitcoin Pizza Day ever since. There is a dedicated Twiter feed that talks about what 10,000 BTC equals to according to the market value on that day. Hanyecz made the recent purchase by paying 649000 satoshis, or 0.00649 bitcoins which sums to $62 for both the pizzas.
The first ever documented physical purchase on the Lightning Network took place on Jan. 20 last month, when Reddit user /u/btc_throwaway1337posted about a purchase of VPN Router being made through a payment channel provided by TorGuard. Also the first Bitcoin ATM transaction made using the Lightning Network was reported earlier this month that was reported by an Austria-based cryptocurrency startup Coinfinity.
While concluding his post, Hanyecz asks his readers: “So is there any point to doing this instead of an on chain transaction? For what I described here, probably not:” “The goal was just to play around with c-lightning and do something more than shuffling a few satoshi back and forth. Maybe eventually pizza shops will have their own lightning nodes and I can open channels to them directly.”
Bhushan is a FinTech enthusiast and holds a good flair in understanding financial markets. His interest in economics and finance draw his attention towards the new emerging Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrency markets. He is continuously in a learning process and keeps himself motivated by sharing his acquired knowledge. In free time he reads thriller fictions novels and sometimes explore his culinary skills.
