Pizza for (lightning) bitcoins?

Summary:

On February 25, 2018, Laszlo Hanyecz, the man who famously purchased two pizzas with Bitcoin back in 2010, tested the Lightning Network by ordering pizza from a London-based friend and arranging for it to be delivered. Though he couldn't find any nearby pizza shops that accepted Lightning payments, his friend arranged for delivery through a local shop. In order to execute the trade as close to atomically as possible, they improvised by having Hanyecz produce the payment hash preimage to the delivery driver in order to claim his pizza. If he couldn't produce the preimage proving that he paid, then the pizza would not be handed over and would instead be destroyed. The preimage was provided only after Hanyecz paid the invoice, at which point he instantly received the preimage in return. They agreed that the preimage would just be the first and last four characters of the hex string. To receive the preimage, Hanyecz opened a channel and funded it with a sufficient amount for what they estimated the cost would end up being. After this point, Hanyecz had committed his bitcoins to the channel but had not yet risked them. It is important to note that the pizza was scheduled to be destroyed if not paid by Hanyecz, which made him sad. Instead, he believed that the pizza should have been delivered to his friend. He noted that though his friend acted as a middleman, taking on some entrepreneurial risk and prepaying his sub-contractor to prepare and deliver the pizza, it demonstrated the basic premise of how this works for everyday transactions. It could just as well have been the pizza shop accepting payment directly with their own Lightning node. Hanyecz wanted to see if there was a point to using the Lightning Network instead of an on-chain transaction, and while there wasn't much difference for what he described here, he enjoyed playing around with c-lightning and doing something more than shuffling a few satoshi back and forth.

Updated on: 2023-05-24T21:14:22.459633+00:00