In May 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz embarked on a mission to purchase two large pizzas using bitcoin, giving birth to the aptly named Bitcoin Pizza Day.
This event commemorates an early adopter of cryptocurrency who, on May 22, 2010, bought two pizzas with bitcoin, marking the first recorded instance of using bitcoin to purchase tangible goods (to the best of our knowledge).
The person behind this milestone was Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer from Florida and an early bitcoin miner. Before the first bitcoin halving in 2012, miners received a reward of 50 BTC for each new block discovered. This meant that mining 200 blocks would yield 10,000 BTC, a relatively simple task given the limited competition at the time.
On May 18, Hanyecz posted on a forum called Bitcointalk.org, expressing his desire to buy pizza, preferably two large ones, using bitcoin. He offered 10,000 BTC to anyone willing to place the order, collect the pizzas, and deliver them to him. Someone pointed out that he could get $41 for those bitcoins on a particular exchange website, where BTC was valued at less than half a cent per coin.
In a 2019 interview with CBS, Hanyecz shared that he believed the transaction “made [bitcoin] real for some people. It certainly did for me.” However, by May 21, he had not yet found anyone to complete the bitcoin pizza transaction. Finally, on the following day, someone accepted his offer, marking a historic moment.
“I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza.” The pizzas were made by Papa John’s, but Hanyecz had purchased them secondhand from a 19-year-old named Jeremy Sturdivant, known by the username “jercos.”
Needless to say, the value of those same bitcoins increased significantly over the next decade. In fact, if Hanyecz had hypothetically sold his entire stash at bitcoin’s all-time high of $68,990, he could have earned around $690 million, enough to buy 46 million large Papa John’s pizzas at $15 each.
To honor this historic event, the global crypto community gathers every year on May 22 to celebrate the first physical bitcoin transaction and to humorously remind Hanyecz how he could have been one-tenth as wealthy as Melinda Gates.