Bitcoin Pizza Day is a day of celebration. On May 22, 2010, a Bitcoin enthusiast made a purchase of two pizzas using the cryptocurrency bitcoin. This was the first time that someone made a purchase using bitcoin (that we know of).
Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer from Florida, was one of the first bitcoin miners.
Before the bitcoin halving in 2012, each successful miner earned 50 BTCs for discovering a new block of BTCs. That means mining 200 blocks to generate 10,000 BTC was easy, assuming there weren’t too many other people mining at the time of the transaction.
On May 18, Hanyecz published a post on the Bitcointalk.org forum stating that he intended to use bitcoin to buy two large pizzas. Whoever he could request, collect and deliver the BTCs, he guaranteed a reward of 10,000 BTCs. On an exchange website, they were valued at less than half a cent each, meaning he could potentially make $41 on them.
In a 2019 interview with Anderson Cooper on CBS, he stated that the deal “made [BTC] real for certain people.” “It worked for me.”
On May 21, he still had not completed his bitcoin pizza transaction, which he had started. Someone did accept his offer the next day. This is a momentous decision.
“I was able to successfully exchange 10,000 BTCs for pizza. The pizzas were made by Papa John’s, but Hanyecz bought them from Jeremy Sturdivant, who was 19 at the time. (The username “jercos” is suggested.)
Those same BTCs, of course, increased in value over the next decade. A hypothetical sale of all of Hanyecz’s BTCs to the all-time high of $68,990 would have netted him almost $690 million, which would have been enough to buy 46 million large Papa John’s pizzas at $15 each.
All members of the global cryptocurrency community gather on May 22 each year to commemorate the first physical transaction of BTCs and to remind Hanyecz how he could have ended up with a tenth of Melinda Gates’ riches.
