Every year, on May 22, the crypto industry celebrates Bitcoin Pizza Day. Although it is not about pizza with Bitcoin, it is about Bitcoin and about pizza. Here’s what happened.
In 2010, a user named “laszlo” started a thread called “Pizza for bitcoins?” on bitcointalk.org. They offered to “pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas.”
Laszlo said that what he was “aiming for is getting food delivered in exchange for bitcoins where I don’t have to order or prepare it myself,” basically describing a transaction between two parties, where one party pays for a service and the other party performs this service (in this case, ordering/delivering pizza).
After a couple of unsuccessful replies, Laszlo even asked if the amount of Bitcoin he was offering was too low (imagine that!).
On May 22, he messaged on the forum that he “successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza” and even shared images.
The pizza was ordered from one of the Papa John’s cafes in Jacksonville, Florida, and now there is even a plaque in memory of that.
And since then, May 22 has been celebrated as Bitcoin Pizza day or the day of the first-ever publicly known Bitcoin transaction. At the time of the transaction, 100,000 Bitcoin were worth around $40; today (at press time), 10,000 BTC amounts to over $293 million.
Where’s the Bitcoin Pizza guy now?
Laszlo, whose real name is Laszlo Hanyecz, is a developer who actually contributed to Bitcoin code and was the first one to release the Bitcoin code for Mac OS and script GPU mining code for Bitcoin.
Hanyecz has been staying away from the public or social media. In an interview with CoinDesk in 2020, he said he was working for a company called GORUCK, a racking company, and that it was accepting Bitcoin as payment.
When asked whether he thinks it was a good decision to pay so much (given today’s prices) at the time, Hanyecz said, “I don’t regret it. I think that it’s great that I got to be part of the early history of Bitcoin in that way.”
