By ALAN SUDERMAN

It’s not an official holiday – yet – but for many cryptocurrency enthusiasts “Bitcoin Pizza Day” is still special. Thursday marks the 15th anniversary of the first known use of cryptocurrency to buy real-world goods.

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The 10,000 bitcoin that software developer Laszlo Hanyecz paid for two Papa John’s pizzas delivered to his Florida home on May 22, 2010, were worth about $41 at the time. Today they’re worth $1.1 billion, as bitcoin hits record high prices.

Several cryptocurrency companies are announcing promotions and other celebrations to mark Bitcoin Pizza Day. Bitget, a cryptocurrency exchange, announced that it’s giving away pizzas to more than 2,000 people at gatherings held around the world.

Here’s the backstory of Bitcoin Pizza Day:

Humble Beginnings

The first bitcoin was created in early 2009 by the digital currency’s still unknown creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. It started as a passion project for libertarian-minded computer nerds who wanted to create a digital payment system that didn’t rely on a third party – like a government or financial institution – for transactions.

Hanyecz was an early enthusiast and became active on an early bitcoin internet message board, offering technical advice on how to “mine” bitcoin more effectively.

Central to bitcoin’s technology is the process through which transactions are verified and then recorded on what’s known as the blockchain. Computers connected to the bitcoin network race to solve complex mathematical calculations that verify the transactions, with the winner earning newly minted bitcoins as a reward in a process known as mining.

In the early days, enthusiasts could mine bitcoin through their home computers and Hanyecz accumulated thousands of the new digital asset. Nowadays, mining bitcoin has become a highly competitive field with multi-billion-dollar companies using specialized computers in entire data centers to acquire new bitcoins.

‘No weird fish topping’

No one quite knew what to do with the bitcoin they were mining at first. On May 18, 2010, Hanyecz tried an experiment and posted a message offering 10,000 bitcoins for pizza.

“I like things like onions, peppers, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, pepperoni, etc.. just standard stuff no weird fish topping or anything like that,” Hanyecz wrote.

Three days later, Hanyecz wondered if he needed to up the price.

“So nobody wants to buy me pizza? Is the bitcoin amount I’m offering too low?” he wrote.

But the next day, Hanyecz said he’d successfully traded his bitcoin for pizza. Another bitcoin enthusiast from California had paid for the Papa John’s pizza in exchange for the cryptocurrency, according to a book about bitcoin’s early history, “Digital Gold.”

“A great milestone reached,” said another early bitcoin enthusiast on the message board congratulating Hanyecz.

Tremendous growth

It did not take long for bitcoin to take off after the first pizza deal. Bitcoin started getting more publicity and grew, thanks in part to the popularity of an online black-market site, Silk Road, which only accepted bitcoin.

By February 2014, with bitcoin trading at around $600, Hanyecz marveled at what the digital currency had become.

“I mean people can say I’m stupid, but it was a great deal at the time,” Hanyecz wrote on the bitcoin message board. “I don’t think anyone could have known it would take off like this.”

Five years later, when bitcoin was trading as high as $11,000, Hanyecz reflected on what buying that first pizza meant for bitcoin.

“It made it real for some people, I mean it certainly did for me,” Hanyecz said on the television show “60 minutes.”

Hanyecz has largely stayed out of the public spotlight in recent years and efforts to contact him by The Associated Press were unsuccessful.

All-time highs

After many years of fits and starts, bitcoin now appears firmly entrenched in the mainstream financial system. While it hasn’t taken off as a way to pay for everyday items like pizza, bitcoin has found popularity as a kind of “digital gold,” or a way to store value.

Retirement accounts can buy bitcoin ETFs, more and more companies buy bitcoin as corporate treasuries, and President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order establishing a government reserve of bitcoin.

Bitcoin was trading at about $111,000 on Thursday morning — a new record. That price gives it a market cap of more than $2 trillion, or about the same as Amazon.

By CARLA K. JOHNSON

Excess body weight can raise the risk of certain cancers, leading researchers to wonder whether blockbuster drugs like Wegovy, Ozempic and Zepbound could play a role in cancer prevention.

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Now, a study of 170,000 patient records suggests there’s a slightly lower risk of obesity-related cancers in U.S. adults with diabetes who took these popular medications compared to those who took another class of diabetes drug not associated with weight loss.

This type of study can’t prove cause and effect, but the findings hint at a connection worth exploring. More than a dozen cancers are associated with obesity.

“This is a call to scientists and clinical investigators to do more work in this area to really prove or disprove this,” said Dr. Ernest Hawk of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, who was not involved in the study.

The findings were released Thursday by the American Society of Clinical Oncology and will be discussed at its annual meeting in Chicago. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, was led by Lucas Mavromatis, a medical student at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.

“Chronic disease and chronic disease prevention are some of my passions,” said Mavromatis, a former research fellow with an NIH training program.

GLP-1 receptor agonists are injections used to treat diabetes, and some are also approved to treat obesity. They work by mimicking hormones in the gut and the brain to regulate appetite and feelings of fullness. They don’t work for everyone and can produce side effects that include nausea and stomach pain.

In the study, researchers analyzed data from 43 U.S. health systems to compare two groups: people with obesity and diabetes who took GLP-1 drugs and other people with the same conditions who took diabetes drugs like sitagliptin. The two groups were equal in size and matched for other characteristics.

FILE – The injectable drug Ozempic is shown, July 1, 2023, in Houston. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip, File)

After four years, those who took GLP-1 drugs had a 7% lower risk of developing an obesity-related cancer and an 8% lower risk of death from any cause compared to those who took the other type of diabetes drug. There were 2,501 new cases of obesity-related cancer in the GLP-1 group compared to 2,671 cases in the other group.

The effect was evident in women, but not statistically significant in men. The study couldn’t explain that difference, but Mavromatis noted that differences in blood drug concentration, weight loss, metabolism or hormones could be at play.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Saving the world often enough has a way of inflating any superstar’s ego. Early in “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” the bulky, sentimental, slightly pious but nonetheless satisfying capper to an eight-film franchise, the U.S. president (Angela Bassett, returning to the role) refers to espionage all-star Ethan Hunt as “the best of men,” and by inference the first man you call when you need someone to run an errand in a Tom Cruise hurry.

Later in the movie, another character sneers that Hunt is way past ordinary greatness; he’s now “the Chosen One.” Not just a world saver, but a world savior! By this point in the sanctification of our hero, “Final Reckoning” has made it relentlessly clear that only these two superstars — Cruise (real, and a proven industry savior thanks to the pandemic-era “Top Gun: Maverick”) and Hunt (fictional) — can prevent the “truth-eating digital parasite” and next-generation artificial intelligence troublemaker known as The Entity from destroying the world. Its mission, clearly accepted, is to redesign Earth according to its own controversial notions of progress and preferred sentient AI-to-human ratio.

The Entity emerged two summers ago in “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” with Hunt’s rogue Impossible Mission Force scrambling after the literal and metaphoric key to vanquishing its renovation plans. The AI source code, we learned from the earlier outing, lies at the bottom of the Bering Sea, stashed in a sunken Russian submarine. Much of the new picture concerns the retrieval of that plot device. In one of “Final Reckoning’s” most compelling sequences, finessed nicely for maximum intentional audience breath-holding, Hunt risks the bends and death itself to complete this piece of the mission, as he rolls around amid massive cylindrical nukes in the hulk of the sub rolling around and upside down on the ocean floor. A little “Inception,” a little “Poseidon Adventure.”

In league with its sniveling human colleague Gabriel (Esai Morales, cackling with evil intent as if being paid by the cackle), The Entity conducts a good deal of digital foreplay in the new movie, co-written and directed by “M:I” franchise veteran Christopher McQuarrie. This means the AI monster is hacking into the world’s nuclear defense systems and taking control of the missiles, one paralyzed and panicking nation at a time. Meanwhile Hunt’s team, back in reasonably good graces with the U.S. government despite Henry Czerny’s welcome, born-to-distrust return to the franchise as CIA director Kittridge, follows a travel itinerary spanning the U.K., the U.S., Norway (subbing for St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea off Alaska) and South Africa.

Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.” (Paramount Pictures and Skydance/TNS)

McQuarrie’s script, written with Eric Jendresen, manages to stretch a fairly simple, easily summarized plot into the longest of the eight “M:I” films. At 169 minutes, it’s about an hour longer than director Brian De Palma’s 1996 swank, cynical, quite beautiful diversion based on the hit TV series. The grandiosity and solemnity of the stakes in “Final Reckoning” test the very limits of what some of us want from an “M:I” movie. Maybe it’s a matter of real-world confidence in some of our leaders; watching a film about what might happen in a case of uncertain nuclear intentions, and wondering how your own leaders would handle it, well, it’s basically the opposite of escapism.

The dialogue scenes all have two or three too many reiterations of the mission’s importance per hour of running time. Elsewhere, “Final Reckoning” becomes a festival of callbacks and flashbacks to the entire series, with dozens of Easter eggs for the superfans, including the release date of the De Palma movie. Just in time, for my taste, the climax goes old-school for old times’ sake, per the producer and star’s wishes, featuring Gabriel’s biplane winging its way through narrow gorges while Cruise dangles off the wing, making sure we see that it’s him there, not a stunt double. In “Dead Reckoning” two years ago, the big wow was the motorcycle plummet and parachute routine, pretty amazing, and nicely compact in its duration and impact. The climax of “Final Reckoning” is likewise impressive and scenic, but also what you might call lengthy. Show-offy. Paced and edited less for the good of the overall movie and more for risk-verification purposes.

That said, this franchise has class. Always has. Plus, it has the virtue, taken as a 29-year entity, of having had a striking variety of directors at the helm. McQuarrie’s ideal in many ways, devoted to both traditional ’60s-derived “exotic” locations and spy games, and to star maintenance and ever-higher threat levels. Stalwart regulars from Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg to more recent series ringers Hayley Atwell and Pom Klementieff act as grounding points for this purported wrap-up, which may be more at home in the air or underwater but there it is.

And there’s this, a small thing in theory, but a huge bonus in practice. It’s not a spoiler, since he’s foregrounded, conspicuously, in the “Final Reckoning” trailer, but the movie boasts a real dinger of a callback: the very minor role of CIA analyst William Donloe. He’s the fellow who failed to notice Cruise hanging from wires in that vault in the bowels of Langley in the first film. Last we heard, 29 years ago, then-IMF head Kittridge promised to exile Donloe to a radar tower near the Arctic Circle.

He’s back, in a happily expanded role, and from my perspective, “Final Reckoning” exists primarily to allow the actor playing Donloe, Rolf Saxon, an opportunity most character actors never get in this lifetime. He’s not just there for nostalgia’s sake, but for real scenes, in which Saxon’s nearly forgotten minor player performs with an equally welcome series newbie, Inuk actor Lucy Tulugarjuk, who plays Donloe’s resourceful wife. In a franchise built on extremes, and the grandiosity that tends to come with a near-$400 million dollar production budget, Saxon’s own personal mission appears simply to have been: Play this material nice and easy, not like a callback or a punchline, but a relatable human being in unusual circumstances. He may not hang off a biplane, but the year’s unlikeliest franchise MVP makes “Final Reckoning” something better than superhuman: human.

‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for sequences of strong violence and action, bloody images, and brief language)

Running time: 2:49

How to watch: In theaters May 23

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(Ben Sargent)

To see more political cartoons from Ben Sargent, visit our Loon Star State section. Find Observer political reporting here.

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