#Gate广场披萨节

Stop mocking Laszlo—if you traveled back 16 years, you might do the same!

If you had the power to travel through time, what would you do? Faced with this question, I have two answers: first, go back to 1998 during the financial crisis and buy a building in Shenzhen, then sell it in 2022. Second, travel back to 2010, stop Laszlo from exchanging his ten thousand bitcoins for those two thin slices of pizza, and tell him, “Buddy, give me your bitcoins—help me mine them for another year. I’ll treat you to Pizza Hut for a lifetime, until you get to the point where seeing pizza makes you want to vomit!”

But then, on second thought, something feels off. Because according to spacetime theory, any altered history will affect future generations. If that original deal hadn’t happened, maybe people wouldn’t have realized that digital currency could be used “as money,” and there wouldn’t have been so many geeks rushing forward and tirelessly preaching for Bitcoin. Today, Bitcoin might still be just a pile of code, and the bitcoins in my hands might still be worthless. Thinking of that, although I’d be extremely reluctant, if I took those 10,000 bitcoins, I might also have to turn around and exchange them for those two slices of pizza (of course, a smarter move would be to use 5,000 to buy one slice of pizza and keep the other 5,000 😀). This isn’t a simple transaction—it’s a choice that changes history. As Laszlo himself put it: “If nobody was willing to take it, Bitcoin wouldn’t have come to be what it is today.”

So did that pizza transaction mean Laszlo lost? No—he won. Because for him, it wasn’t a loss; it was a brilliant, dimensionality-reduction arbitrage. He used the digital code he mined himself—almost at zero cost—to exchange for hot, real, filling food. For a geek, that’s more exhilarating than making money. Even more importantly, in an era when gold had just begun to be recognized, his first “trying crab” experience helped give Bitcoin’s hash-value code the property of being able to purchase goods as a general equivalent—also making countless geeks’ eyes light up, showing them a new future. That’s what led to the later coin world, and that’s how today’s “digital gold” came to be!