What is Bitcoin Pizza Day?

What is Bitcoin Pizza Day?

In May 2010, a developer from Florida and one of the first Bitcoin miners, Laszlo Hanyecz, tried to buy two large pizzas with Bitcoin. On May 18, he announced on the Bitcointalk.org forum that he wanted to buy a pizza - preferably two large ones - using bitcoin. He offered 10,000 BTC to anyone willing to order, collect and deliver them to him. BTC was worth less than half a cent back then.

By May 21, he still had not been able to find anyone willing to do the transaction. Then, finally, the next day someone accepted his offer. A move that will later go down in history. That someone was a 19-year-old named Jeremy Sturdivant, and May 22nd would become known as “Bitcoin Pizza Day,” the day when it was first publicly mentioned that someone had used bitcoin to buy physical goods.

By the way, before the first bitcoin halving in 2012, every successful miner was rewarded with 50 BTC for discovering a new block. This meant that only 200 blocks needed to be mined to earn 10,000 BTC, which was not particularly difficult considering that at the time there were not many people competing to mine them.

Needless to say, the value of those same bitcoins rose pretty steeply over the next decade. If Hanyecz had hypothetically sold his entire stock at the all-time high bitcoin price of $68,990, he would have made about $690 million—enough to buy 46 million large Papa John's pizzas at $15 a piece.