Bitcoin Pizza Day

May 22, 2010. Laszlo Hanyecz, a Florida programmer and one of Bitcoin’s earliest miners, posted on the Bitcoin forum:

“I’ll pay 10,000 Bitcoin for a couple of pizzas.”

At the time, 10,000 Bitcoin was worth roughly $41. Someone took him up on it, ordered two Papa John’s pizzas, and had them delivered to Laszlo’s door.

Laszlo was thrilled. He posted photos. He’d proved something important — that Bitcoin could be used to buy real things. That it had practical value as a medium of exchange, not just as a curiosity on a mailing list.

At today’s prices, those two pizzas would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Every May 22, the Bitcoin community celebrates Bitcoin Pizza Day. Not as a joke about Laszlo’s bad trade — he’s said he doesn’t regret it — but as a commemoration of the first real-world Bitcoin transaction.

Laszlo wasn’t stupid. He was pioneering. He spent Bitcoin when spending Bitcoin meant something. He contributed to proving that the network worked, that the coins had real-world utility, that this wasn’t just a game.

The pizza story gets told as a punchline. But it’s really a founding moment — the day Bitcoin became money in the most practical sense. Someone wanted something, someone had Bitcoin, and a trade was made.

Every financial system in history started with a transaction exactly like this one.

Tomorrow: the Silk Road — and what it proved about Bitcoin that nobody expected.

— The Daily Bit