Bitcoin Pizza Day 2020: How two Papa John's pies became famous

Today, the whole crypto community is celebrating the 10th anniversary of Bitcoin Pizza Day. Exactly ten years ago, Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer from Florida who also contributed to Bitcoin's source code in the past, made the first documented purchase of physical goods with Bitcoin.

“I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza,” Hanyecz wrote on the BitcoinTalk forum on May 22, 2010. He provided several photographs of the pizzas.

More than anything, Hanyecz’s purchase was a proof of concept, designed to demonstrate that Bitcoin—more of a “geek novelty” at the time that almost no one knew about—could, and should be, a “real” currency and a means of exchange.

Ten years later, the total market capitalization of the crypto industry now amounts to more than $254 billion, and the biggest players in the space are still celebrating that historic purchase of two pizzas.

It’s hard to say how much exactly 10,000 BTC was worth in May 2010 as different sources name figures between $25 and $41. But today, 10,000 BTC is worth around $91 million—and was worth twice that much in late 2017, when the price of Bitcoin temporarily reached $20,000.

“I'd like to think that what I did helped. But I think if it wasn't me, somebody else would have come along. And maybe it wouldn't have been pizza,” Hanyecz explained in May 2018.

“But I think Bitcoin was kind of destined to get big, and I didn't know everything about Bitcoin back then—I mean, I had only been playing with it a couple months, and I figured out how to mine, I actually wrote the first GPU miner—and that's how I got all those Bitcoins that I was kind of giving away,” he added. He has also said that he doesn't regret making the purchase.

This wasn’t the only thing Hanyecz spent Bitcoin on. According to 60 Minutes, he spend around 40,000 Bitcoin in total at the time—worth $364 million today. Which seems like a lot, but you can’t put a price on fame.