On May 22, 2010, a Florida programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz posted a request on the Bitcoin forum. “I’ll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas,” he wrote. “Like maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day.” At the time, 10,000 BTC was worth about $41. A few days later, a British teenager calling himself jercos accepted the offer. He called a Papa John’s, ordered two large pizzas, and had them delivered to Hanyecz’s home. In exchange, Hanyecz sent him 10,000 bitcoins.
This transaction — now celebrated every year on May 22 as “Bitcoin Pizza Day” — was not the first Bitcoin transaction. Hal Finney had received coins from Satoshi 16 months earlier. But it was the first time Bitcoin was used to buy a real-world physical product. For the first time, Bitcoin had been exchanged for something with objective value in the normal economy.
Of course, the transaction became famous for a different reason. Those 10,000 BTC, at Bitcoin’s later all-time highs, would be worth more than $700 million. This makes those pizzas among the most expensive in history. People have teased Hanyecz about it for years. His answer has always been the same: no regrets. Without someone being willing to actually spend Bitcoin, it would never have become real money.
Hanyecz was not a random user. He was actually an early Bitcoin miner and developer. In those days, before specialized mining hardware existed, you could mine Bitcoin on an ordinary computer. Hanyecz was one of the first to figure out how to mine on a GPU — graphics card — making him dramatically more efficient than other miners. He earned thousands of bitcoins this way.
Bitcoin Pizza Day has become the most celebrated unofficial holiday in the crypto world. Every year, on May 22, millions of people post pictures of pizzas on social media, toast Hanyecz and jercos, and reflect on how far Bitcoin has come. The transaction is memorialized in t-shirts, murals, and even actual pizza boxes. It reminds everyone of a simple truth: sometimes the most important moments in history are the ones where someone just decides to try something.
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