7 ways to buy a piping-hot pizza with Bitcoin

The day will come when every honest-to-God pizza joint from the Pacific coastlines of the United States to the rolling meadows of the Japanese satoyama will accept Bitcoin. Probably. But until that P-day of cheesy reckoning meaterialises, how, pray, will you gluttonous nice people cope?

We have the answers.

1. Order pizza from takeaways in Germany

Lieferando, a German online takeaway giant, features a BitPay extension allowing its 3.9 million customers to make payments in Bitcoin. So ditch that foul bratwurst, Heimlich, and head on down to your local Lieferando website for some spine-tingingly juicy slabs of financially sovereign Margherita! For Merkel!

2. Use Lightning Network to buy Pizza

Lightning pizza? Is that some kind of superfast service where it's delivered by The Flash himself?

Actually, Lightning Pizza is a U.S.-only service that lets you buy Domino’s pizza (oh come on. It’s perfectly edible...) with Bitcoin using the Lightning Network—a service that allows fast Bitcoin micropayments. To get started, read our review of the Lightning wallet on Android here. Once it’s all set up, you just order your greasy meal of choice on the Lightning Pizza website, make a Lightning payment—and zap, your money has been sent. Wasn’t that exciting?

3. Order a thick crust in the U.S. with Pizza For Coins

“Order, pay with Bitcoins and EAT!” screams the subheading on the official “Pizza for Coins” website, and you know what—we’re happy to oblige whichever high-blood-pressure madman wrote that.

PIzza for Coins doesn’t represent a takeaway or restaurant per se, but rather, like a dubious, crypto version of Uber Eats, aggregates restaurants’ menus and lets you pay—in BITCOIN—via its own website. We don’t know if “Pizza for Coins” even works, but that goes for most things in crypto, tbh.

4. Pay someone in Bitcoin to order you a pizza

Okay, this one is cheating a little bit. But, it has precedent.

Back in 2011, way before Binance was pumping shitcoins, Bitcoin developer Laszlo Hanyecz made history when he conducted the first ever Bitcoin-based purchase: two large-and-unspecified pizzas from Papa John's. Given that this was before more than seven people even knew what bitcoin was, how did Hanyecz pull it off? He simply took to BitcoinTalk—a popular Bitcoin forum—and asked whether anyone would order him a pizza for a few bitcoins.

On May 22, 2010, a date now revered by historians as “Bitcoin Pizza Day,” Hanyecz received two large Papa John’s pizzas in exchange for 10,000 Bitcoin, worth $41 at the time. The story concluded bitterly as those bitcoins would have been worth $200 million at Bitcoin’s peak price in December, 2017. He could have gotten at least three extra toppings for that cost.

5. Do a one-on-one swap with your local pizza shop

And if all of the above fails, you can live your life like a surprisingly tech-savvy 12th century peasant and barter your way to crispy, tomato heaven. Give it a go, children—skip down to your local pizzeria and attempt to exchange your Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies, or a pig, for some sort of ham-and-pineapple-deep-fat-fried monstrosity that’ll have you quaking in your penny loafers till Dr. Fleischman drops by with his daily valium shot. That is if you’re one of those irredeemable, moral degenerate people who has the audacity to inflict pineapple on your pizza.

6. Pay your local take-out joint to accept Bitcoin...Cash

You know the only thing Bitcoin’s good for? Buying up the far superior (so we've heard) Bitcoin Cash, which is sponsored by such luminaries as Roger Ver and Craig Wright, both of whom are principled to the nth degree and lucid in their every judgement, financial or otherwise.

So, buy up a wadge of Bitcoin Cash, head over to this site where people place “bounties,” ranging in price from $1 to $5,000, that pizza joints can claim if they choose to accept Bitcoin Cash. So far, only four of these bounties—in Osaka (Japan), Nyeri, (Kenya), Barquisimeto (Venezuela), and Maracaibo (also Venezuela)—have actually been rewarded, yet if you want pizza in your local area, you gotta make the sacrifice: place a Bitcoin Cash bounty for $12 billion for pizza joints in Pine Bluff, Arizona, the miserable backwater where we assume you all live. Do it. Do it, now.

7. Just don’t try phoning up Domino’s, it won’t work

It’s easy to believe everything you read in the ol’ Mainstream Crypto Media. If you read this headline, for instance, you might have figured that Domino’s had put its pizza where its mouth was and gone all-out on accepting Bitcoin. This isn’t wholly true, but you can order a Domino’s using Lightning Pizza (step two). So, swings and roundabouts, EH?

Did you buy pizza with Bitcoin and find it life-changing, disappointing or otherwise disturbing? If so, make sure to email us at noreply@decryptmedia.com. We’ll get back to you once we’ve stopped scoffing all this test pizza we just bought. Wait, is that PINEAPPLE?