Bitcoin Pizza Day: The story about a $300 million dinner

Bitcoin Pizza Day commemorates the day in 2010 when Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer and BTC miner from Florida, used the crypto to purchase two pizzas from Papa John’s. It occurs every year on May 22. It is the first physical item purchased with the first decentralized digital currency.

Before Bitcoin’s coronation as an alternative asset class or getting the attention of institutional and celebrity investors, it was only an experiment between cypherpunks and cryptographers without any market value or any real-world applications.

On May 18, 2010 – 14 months after the Bitcoin genesis block – a computer programmer, Laszlo Hanyecz, posted at bitcointalk.org that he was willing to buy two pizzas for Bitcoins.

And here is his original post:

“I’ll pay 10,000 Bitcoins for a couple of pizzas. Like maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day. I like having left over pizza to nibble on later.”

At the time, 10,000 Bitcoins were roughly calculated to be around $41. There were not many people who accepted or were interested in Laszlo’s proposal in the first few days.

But on the fourth day, May 22, another forum member, then 19-year-old Jeremy Sturdivant from California, took him up on the deal and had two Papa John’s pizzas delivered to Laszlo in Florida.

This date has become known as Bitcoin Pizza Day and the value of those pizzas now is $295,158,640!

Bitcoin Pizza Day is not about the man who gave away $300 million worth of Bitcoin for a couple of pizzas. It’s much more than that.

This was the first time Bitcoin was used as a medium of exchange, one of the key roles of money, and used in a real-world application with its intended creation – peer-to-peer transactions without an intermediary.

As for Sturdivant, he’s not a 30-something multi-millionaire these days. Not long after the deal, he spent the Bitcoin while traveling around the US on holiday with his girlfriend.

“If I had treated it (the Bitcoin) as an investment, I might have held on a bit longer,” he told the UK Telegraph a few years ago.

Meanwhile, more than 15,000 establishments worldwide already accept cryptocurrency as payment. Movies, basketball tickets, airline packages, hotel bookings, video games, and fashion clothes are among the items that can be purchased using cryptocurrency.

Image Source: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-pizza-day-p2p-digital-cash-actualized-12-years-ago