Written by Hill Far

Editor: Flumen, Centreless

This article was published in March 2025

 The pizza I bought at that time

At 12:35 on May 18, 2010, a user named Laszlo posted a bounty on the Bitcoin forum, offering to exchange 10,000 Bitcoins for two large pizzas. The seller could make the pizzas himself or order takeout. In the post, he also detailed his taste preferences. Prior to that, on April 16, he joined the Bitcoin Talk Forum, a forum initiated by Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin had just appeared in 2010, and people were still unfamiliar with this so-called "digital cryptocurrency" on the Internet, and had not formed the concept of trading. Therefore, the post did not immediately cause much response. Only a few users expressed their willingness to buy him pizza, but because they were not in the United States, the transaction could not be completed.

At that time, 10,000 bitcoins were worth about $30, so Laszlo wondered if his bid was too low. Four days later, on May 22, Laszlo replied on the forum that he had successfully bought the pizza and posted a photo of it. May 22 thus became "Bitcoin Pizza Day."

The historical significance of this transaction is that it is the first transaction since the birth of Bitcoin, which means that Bitcoin has the transaction function of currency from now on, rather than just being stored on the Internet. Of course, this first offline transaction of Bitcoin is also somewhat experimental, that is, to test whether Bitcoin has the actual use function of "currency".

According to an interview with Bitcoin Magazine in 2019, when talking about why he did this, Laszlo said, “The reason I wanted to buy pizza with Bitcoin is because it was free pizza for me. I mean, I wrote this thing and mined Bitcoin, and I felt like I won the Internet that day - I earned pizza by contributing to open source projects. Usually hobbies cost time and money, and in this case, my hobby bought me dinner.”

 Laszlo

Laszlo's "experiment" was also related to the difficulty of mining at the time. As a programmer, he was one of the first people to come into contact with Bitcoin and the inventor of mining with graphics cards. It is said that he quickly mined tens of thousands of Bitcoins.

According to Blockchain explorer OXT chart tool, Laszlo's wallet began to receive more funds from May 2010, with the peak balance reaching 20,962 BTC that month. It can be seen that the 10,000 bitcoins consumed by the pizza were quickly replenished through mining (his wallet hit a record high of 43,854 BTC in June 2010, and BTC has slowly flowed out since then. Of course, he may have more than one wallet).

After the Bitcoin-for-pizza transaction, as the price of Bitcoin continued to rise, some netizens kept updating the latest prices of the two pizzas under the post. Laszlo also left a message saying that he did not expect Bitcoin to rise so fast.

Even though Bitcoin became more and more valuable, Laszlo Hanyecz later said in an interview that he did not regret the pizza transaction and did not suffer from insomnia because of it. In his words, he was quite happy at that time, after all, he could get free pizza by using a graphics card.

In fact, after completing the first transaction, Laszlo Hanyecz began to frequently use Bitcoin for payment, spending about 100,000 Bitcoins, which are worth more than 4 billion US dollars now. The pizza that Laszlo bought with 10,000 Bitcoins worth about 30 US dollars at that time is now worth more than 260 million US dollars.

Laszlo himself has always been relatively low-key. He has not opened his own social media account, and it is not known whether he has become rich because of Bitcoin.

But you can continue to follow the whereabouts of the 10,000 bitcoins after Laszlo bought the pizza.

The seller who made the deal with Laszlo Hanyecz was a 19-year-old California boy named Jeremy Sturdivant. He started to get involved in Bitcoin in 2009 and mined thousands of Bitcoins himself. Jeremy was actually an early consumer of Bitcoin. He would use Bitcoin to pay online or offline whenever he had the chance. According to him, he spent the 10,000 Bitcoins on traveling with his girlfriend.

In 2018, Jeremy admitted in an interview that he never thought that Bitcoin would have such a big appreciation potential in the future. Even so, he did not regret spending these Bitcoins. He felt that the transaction of selling pizza brought him a total income of US$400, which appreciated tenfold, and the transaction was still a good deal.

Later, everyone witnessed the price trend of Bitcoin. In May 2023, the market and capital are still full of confidence in Bitcoin and look forward to the arrival of the next halving period.

Hanyecz also maintains this positive attitude. This may be because his approach to Bitcoin has not changed since he joined the Bitcoin open source community in 2010. For him, it is still just a hobby rather than a career.

The low-key Hanyecz has since remained involved as a Bitcoin enthusiast.

“Honestly, I kind of stayed out of it because there was so much attention,” he said. “I didn’t want to draw that attention and I certainly didn’t want people to think I was Satoshi… I just thought it was better as a hobby. I have a normal job, I’m not doing Bitcoin full-time. I don’t want it to be my responsibility and my career. I’m glad I was able to be involved to this extent.”

Bitcoin Magazine reported on May 22, 2019 that they were also happy to have Hanyecz involved. “After all, he provided us with Bitcoin Core and GPU mining on MacOS — and the pizza meme, which, while perhaps not as important or impressive as Hanyecz’s other contributions, makes May 22nd memorable (and delicious) for the community every year.”