Written by: Hill Far, Centreless
This article was published in March 2025
The pizza purchased at the time
On May 18, 2010, at 12:35, a user with the ID Laszlo posted a bounty on the Bitcoin forum, willing to exchange 10,000 BTC for two large pizzas, with the seller able to make them or order takeout, and he detailed his taste preferences in the post. Prior to this, on April 16, he had joined the Bitcoin Talk Forum initiated by Bitcoin's founder Satoshi Nakamoto.
In 2010, Bitcoin had just emerged, and people were still unfamiliar with this so-called "digital cryptocurrency" existing on the internet, let alone having a concept of trading. Therefore, the post did not immediately cause much reaction, with only a few users willing to buy him pizza, but unable to complete the transaction due to not being in the United States.
At the time, 10,000 BTC was worth about $30, which made Laszlo wonder if he had offered too low a price. Until four days later, on May 22, Laszlo replied in the forum that he had successfully bought pizza and shared photos of the purchased pizza. May 22 thus became "Bitcoin Pizza Day".
The historical significance of this transaction was that it was the first transaction since Bitcoin's birth, meaning that Bitcoin now had a monetary exchange function, rather than just being stored on the network. Of course, this first offline Bitcoin transaction was also somewhat experimental, testing whether Bitcoin actually had the functional use of "currency".
According to an interview with Laszlo by Bitcoin Magazine in 2019, when asked why he did this, Laszlo said, "I wanted to buy pizza with Bitcoin because it was free pizza to me. What I mean is, I wrote this thing and mined Bitcoin, feeling like I won the internet that day—I got pizza by contributing to an open-source project. Usually, hobbies cost time and money, but in this case, my hobby bought me dinner."
Laszlo
Laszlo's "experiment" was also related to the ease of mining blocks at the time. As a programmer, he was among the first to come into contact with Bitcoin and is credited with inventing GPU mining, reportedly quickly mining tens of thousands of bitcoins.
According to the Blockchain explorer OXT chart tool, Laszlo's wallet saw more funds flowing in from May 2010, with a monthly balance peak of 20,962 BTC. It can be seen that the 10,000 BTC spent on pizza was quickly replenished through mining (his wallet reached a historical high of 43,854 BTC in June 2010, after which BTC slowly flowed out, though he may have more than one wallet).
After the Bitcoin pizza transaction, as the Bitcoin price rose, netizens continuously updated the latest market price of those two pizzas in the comments, and Laszlo also commented that he didn't expect Bitcoin to rise so quickly.
Even as Bitcoin became more valuable later, when facing the pizza transaction, Laszlo Hanyecz said in interviews that he did not regret the consumption or lose sleep over it. In his words, he was quite happy during that period, after all, he could eat free pizza just 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 BTC, worth about $4 billion now. The 10,000 BTC he used to buy pizzas worth about $30 at the time is now worth over $260 million.
Laszlo himself has remained quite low-key, without opening his own social media account, and people are unsure whether he became wealthy due to Bitcoin.
However, we can continue to track the whereabouts of those 10,000 BTC after Laszlo's pizza purchase.
The seller who made the transaction with Laszlo Hanyecz was a 19-year-old California boy named Jeremy Sturdivant. He had been in contact with Bitcoin since 2009 and had mined several thousand bitcoins himself. Jeremy was actually also an early Bitcoin consumer who would use Bitcoin for payment online or offline whenever he had the opportunity. According to his account, he spent these 10,000 BTC on traveling with his girlfriend.
In 2018, Jeremy candidly admitted that he never thought Bitcoin would have such potential for appreciation. Even so, he did not regret spending these bitcoins, feeling that the pizza sale brought him $400 in total, a tenfold increase, making the deal quite worthwhile.
Later, Bitcoin's price trend was witnessed by everyone. In May 2023, the market and capital still had confidence in Bitcoin and looked forward to the next halving period.
Hanyecz has maintained this positive attitude. This might be because since joining the Bitcoin open-source community in 2010, his approach to Bitcoin has not changed. For him, it remains just an amateur hobby, not a profession.
The low-key Hanyecz has since continued to participate as a Bitcoin enthusiast.
"To be honest, I'm a bit detached because of too much attention," he said. "I don't want to attract that kind of attention, and of course, I don't want people to think I'm Satoshi Nakamoto... I just think it's better to treat it as a hobby. I have a normal job, I won't work on Bitcoin full-time. I don't want it to become my responsibility and profession. I'm happy to be involved to this extent."
Bitcoin Magazine reported on May 22, 2019, that they were also glad Hanyecz could be involved. "After all, he provided us with Bitcoin Core on MacOS and GPU mining—and the pizza meme, which might not be as important or impressive as Hanyecz's other contributions, but for the community, it made May 22 every year memorable (and delicious)."
