The man who bought pizza with 10,000 BTC

Author: Maxwells of Golden Finance

It's the annual Bitcoin Pizza Festival again. Pizza Festival on May 22 is one of the biggest memes in the currency circle.

This festival comes from the man who bought two pizzas with 10,000 bitcoins, Laszlo Hanyecz. Please follow the author to dig up the origin of Pizza Festival and the deeds of Laszlo Hanyecz.

On May 18, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz, an early core contributor of Bitcoin, posted on the forum bitcointalk, saying, "I am willing to pay 10,000 bitcoins for two large pizzas... I can make pizza myself and bring it to my home or order it from a pizza shop. My goal is to use Bitcoin to exchange pizza so that I don't have to buy and make it myself... I like onions, peppers, sausages, mushrooms, tomatoes, pepperoni, etc...."

And leave your address. At that time, the market value of 10,000 bitcoins was $40. No one bought him pizza until the 21st. Laszlo Hanyecz was confused for a while, thinking that he might have paid too little bitcoin. On May 22, Laszlo Hanyecz replied in the forum that someone had ordered pizza for him and successfully exchanged 10,000 bitcoins for 2 pizzas.

Laszlo Hanyecz's daughter

In the years that followed, the price of Bitcoin experienced a nearly million-fold increase. Many people felt it was not worth it. But as an early Bitcoin player, Laszlo Hanyecz didn't think so. He said that the pizza was almost free for him. He explained that he contributed code to an open source software project Bitcoin and mined Bitcoin based on his business hobbies. Usually, hobbies waste time and money, but now they can bring him free dinner.

Laszlo Hanyecz later said in an interview that in 2010, he spent nearly 100,000 BTC on pizza, yes, 100,000 Bitcoins. And he often gave Bitcoin to other users on the forum in 100 or 1,000 Bitcoins.

Laszlo Hanyecz's pizza story made Bitcoin have purchasing power in the real world for the first time, thus entering the history of Bitcoin.

In addition to buying pizza, Laszlo Hanyecz has made more contributions to Bitcoin. As a software engineer, he participated in Bitcoin in 2009, fixed some bugs, and built and deployed the first macOS version of Bitcoin Core software.

He also developed GPU mining. In the same month that he bought two pizzas with 10,000 bitcoins, he first introduced GPU mining to the Bitcoin community in May 2010. He tried it with his own MacBook and found that the computing power of the MacBook increased by 10 times, and he could mine more bitcoins. His idea was that with these bitcoins, he would never have to pay for food again.

When he and Satoshi Nakamoto communicated about GPU mining via email, Satoshi Nakamoto disagreed with GPU mining. After he made the code public on the bitcointalk forum, other users also started GPU mining.

Later, Laszlo Hanyecz felt that the community was too noisy and withdrew from Bitcoin development. He no longer worked on Bitcoin full-time, but he was still a Bitcoin holder and cared about the development of Bitcoin.

After the Lightning Network was deployed to the Bitcoin mainnet in 2018, Laszlo Hanyecz used Bitcoin to buy two pizzas again on February 25. The difference was that this time he only spent 0.00649 Bitcoins, which was equivalent to $62 at the time.

In 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz's daughter was still a baby. By 2018, his daughter had become a thriving girl. Just like Bitcoin.