On the day, 15 years ago, Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas from a local chain with 10,000 Bitcoin. That was the first time anyone used Bitcoin to purchase a real-world product. The story has since been repeated so often that it has become something of a legend, a moment that marks the inception of Bitcoin's economic life. But Laszlo did more than just buy pizza. He created a benchmark, a temporal origin story that would reverberate across two decades.
At the time, 10,000 BTC had little to no value (41 Dollars to be exact). It was a mere gesture, a test, a proof-of-concept. Yet with hindsight, it becomes clear that this was the first signal flare of something far greater, maybe the manifestation of a new temporality in finance, a new structure of value grounded not in trust (because in Bitcoin you don’t trust, you verify), not in gold, but in time itself.
Bitcoin isn’t fast, and that’s the point
As the world marched into the second decade of the 21st century, everything began to accelerate: Internet speeds exploded, cloud computing took over, Artificial intelligence began reshaping industries etc. In this context, Bitcoin seemed clunky. It was slow, costly, and limited. Every ten minutes, a new block, not faster, not optimized. Just... ten … slow… minutes.
Many critics called this a flaw. In a world where credit card companies can process 65,000 transactions per second, Bitcoin's sluggish confirmation time was laughable. But this was never a mistake, it was by design.
Bitcoin's proof-of-work consensus algorithm is not a patch. It's the heart of the system. It's what ensures that no single actor can unilaterally control the ledger. It's what anchors trust – not in people, but in computation, in energy, in time.
Each block mined represents a chunk of time, irreversibly etched into history through computational labor. In the digital realm, where everything can be copied, simulated, and forged, time is the one thing that cannot be faked, Bitcoin captures that.
Proof of Work and the cost of time
At the core of Bitcoin lies the most misunderstood idea in its architecture: proof-of-work (PoW). In essence, PoW requires miners to solve a cryptographic puzzle that demands real-world computational effort. The "solution" is arbitrary, a number with certain properties, but finding it takes real energy, hardware, and above all, time.
This mechanism serves three functions:
- It makes double-spending nearly impossible (the point of Nakamoto Satoshi’s White Paper)
- It ensures that the chain grows at a steady, predictable pace (keeping Inflation in check)
- It ties digital value to physical resources (energy consumed etc.)
Critics often deride the energy usage of Bitcoin mining, calling it wasteful. But in this critique lies a misunderstanding. The energy isn't burned for nothing, it is spent to enforce a delay and to secure the blockchain, to make manipulation economically infeasible. In other words, Bitcoin spends real-world resources to protect digital time and itself. The decentralized aspect of Bitcoin would require a single entity to come up with more energy and computational power than the entire network uses in the moment. The days when this was feasible are long gone. And even if so – any fraudulent activity on the blockchain would just crash its value immediately, so it would be a purely destructive act at immense economic costs at zero value for the attacker.
The age of speed and the rise of frictionless capital
Today, financial markets operate at blistering speeds. High-frequency trading algorithms execute orders in microseconds, smart contracts auto-settle obligations, AI models predict and execute trades with minimal human input. Capital flows without borders or delay.
In this system, speed equals power. The faster you are, the more arbitrage you can capture, the more dominance you exert.
But there's a problem, speed also erodes control. Autonomous agents that operate in real-time can outpace human oversight (See my last opinion piece on how Agentification may disrupt capitalism). As AI becomes more deeply enmeshed with capital infrastructure, we face a future in which no one fully understands, let alone governs, the systems running the world.
The need for a brake
This is where Bitcoin re-enters the picture, not as a currency, not as an investment, but as a structural counterforce. Bitcoin is slow, intentionally. It imposes a delay, it inserts friction. Every transaction must wait, every block takes time.
What if that delay is not a flaw, but a feature we desperately need?
Imagine autonomous AIs executing smart contracts, managing DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), issuing synthetic assets, creating interlinked webs of financial logic that move too fast for intervention. What prevents runaway scenarios? What grounds this acceleration?
Bitcoin's time structure offers a form of natural governance. Its block time is a temporal boundary. It says: no matter how fast you want to move, this system moves at its own pace.
Intrinsic value reconsidered
The debate around Bitcoin's intrinsic value has raged for over a decade. Critics claim that since Bitcoin has no cash flows, no underlying asset, and no use in production, it lacks intrinsic value.
But perhaps this is the wrong frame.
What if value lies not in what Bitcoin "does" but in what it prevents?
Bitcoin prevents centralization of control. It prevents undetected manipulation of ledgers. And – probably most relevant to our future – it prevents absolute acceleration.
By anchoring itself in time, Bitcoin introduces a structure of resistance. Its intrinsic value, may lie in its ability to enforce temporal discipline in a system otherwise prone to chaotic overdrive.
Bitcoin as a Temporal Firewall
Let us imagine a future where AI systems create new AI systems, where financial algorithms generate and execute contracts without pause. In this environment, the ability to delay becomes a superpower.
Bitcoin, by design, refuses to go faster, it doesn't trust speed, it doesn't adapt to pressure. It just keeps producing blocks, every ten minutes, like clockwork.
This makes Bitcoin a kind of temporal firewall, a boundary that no system can cross without waiting. It becomes a substrate for governance in a world where nothing waits.
By routing critical systems, identity, ownership, governance, through a Bitcoin-like infrastructure, we buy ourselves time, time to intervene, time to deliberate, time to remain human.
Laszlo's purchase revisited
So what did Laszlo Hanyecz really buy with his 10,000 Bitcoin?
It wasn’t just pizza. It was the initiation of a system that values delay in an age obsessed with speed. A system that, fifteen years later, might hold one of the last keys to preserving autonomy in a world that seems destined to outpace itself.
He bought us a moment. And if we're wise, we’ll use it.
Time is Value
In traditional finance, value is linked to returns, to yield, to growth. But in a world of unchecked acceleration, we may need to invert this logic.
Maybe the most valuable thing is not what moves fastest, but what refuses to.
Bitcoin is not merely a digital currency or an investment vehicle, it’s a temporal technology. Its intrinsic value may not be in what it enables, but in what it resists.
It resists control. It resists revision. It resists haste.
In doing so, it might just give us the most precious resource of all: time to think.
by mario
