"Bitcoin Pizza Day" always reminds him that he traded a fortune worth billions of dollars in the future for a few ordinary pizzas.

Author: Colin Harper

Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Laszlo Hanyecz and the Legendary Pizza Transaction

For Bitcoin users, May 22—also known as "Bitcoin Pizza Day"—is a day of feasting.

Today, Bitcoin enthusiasts around the world celebrate by enjoying pizza in honor of Bitcoin developer and miner Laszlo Hanyecz's famous pizza order on May 22, 2010. On this day 15 years ago, Hanyecz exchanged 10,000 Bitcoins for two large Papa John’s pizzas from another early Bitcoin user.

This transaction marked the first time Bitcoin was used to purchase a real-world commodity, just a year after the cryptocurrency was born.

Laszlo Hanyecz posted the original Bitcoin Pizza Day post on May 18, 2010

His request was fulfilled by another Bitcointalk user four days later.

The Bitcoin community commemorates this "greasy" holiday every year with a mix of celebration and nostalgia, as that 10,000 Bitcoins is now worth over $1 billion.

However, what most people do not know is that Hanyecz may have spent as much as 79,000 Bitcoins on pizza that year, which would be worth over $8.7 billion today. Amid the shock at his "squandering" of billions of dollars, one question is often overlooked: how did Hanyecz originally acquire so many Bitcoins?

The Little-Known Bitcoin Pizza Transactions

In 2019, I interviewed Hanyecz, who mentioned that he had spent nearly 100,000 Bitcoins on pizza in 2010. At the time, he didn’t think much of it, as Bitcoin was virtually worthless back then.

Hanyecz pointed out that the Bitcoin forum Bitcointalk was filled with users who often gave away hundreds or thousands of Bitcoins for free to newcomers.

Hanyecz does not regret this experience. He described himself as having "won the internet that day" because his "hobby bought him dinner."

In fact, he was so pleased with the transaction that he kept the pizza trade proposal open from May 22, 2010, until August 4. On August 4, he posted on Bitcointalk saying, "I can’t keep doing this because I can no longer mine thousands of Bitcoins every day." (We will elaborate on why he could no longer mine later.)

In the same post, he thanked "those who had already bought him pizza," indicating that he indeed made more pizza transactions between May and August.

Four years later, Hanyecz recalled his former Bitcoin wealth in another post. He wrote, "I spent it all on pizza," and included the Bitcoin address he listed in his first Bitcointalk post as proof.

This wallet shows that from its creation on April 10, 2010, until the trade proposal was closed on August 4, Hanyecz transferred out over 79,000 Bitcoins. Today, this wallet contains just enough Bitcoin to buy a large pizza, with the last significant transfer occurring in June 2011, totaling approximately 81,432 Bitcoins.

How Did Hanyecz Acquire These Bitcoins?

In 2009 and 2010, the Bitcoin block reward was 50 Bitcoins per block (plus transaction fees), and a Bitcoin block was generated approximately every 10 minutes. Hanyecz's 81,432 Bitcoins accounted for about 1.5% of all Bitcoins mined at that time. So, how did he accumulate this wealth?

Hanyecz was one of the early prolific developers of Bitcoin. He not only designed the first MacOS client for Bitcoin but also became the first person to discover that graphics cards (GPUs) could be used for mining, after Bitcoin's anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

Hanyecz announced this discovery in May 2010. Before this, Bitcoin miners typically used the central processing unit (CPU) of laptops or desktop computers for mining. The addition of GPUs increased computational power by ten times, significantly enhancing Bitcoin mining efficiency.

This discovery opened "Pandora's box," and by the end of 2010, the computational power of the Bitcoin network had increased by 1,300 times. However, the increased competition was precisely why Hanyecz lamented in his August 2010 Bitcointalk post that he could no longer mine thousands of Bitcoins every day.

The hash rate of Bitcoin surged after Laszlo Hanyecz discovered GPU Bitcoin mining on Bitcoin Pizza Day

Bitcoin Pizza Day and Communication with Satoshi Nakamoto

Hanyecz's discovery also drew polite "criticism" from Satoshi Nakamoto. As Nathaniel Popper described in his book "Digital Gold," Nakamoto had "mixed feelings" about the early introduction of GPU mining, seemingly having foreseen this situation.

Nakamoto wrote in an email:

"For new users, a big attraction is that anyone with a computer can generate some free Bitcoins. This incentive may weaken when the number of users reaches 5,000, but it is still effective at the moment. GPUs will prematurely limit the incentive to only those with high-end GPU hardware. GPU computing clusters will eventually monopolize all generated Bitcoins, but I do not want to accelerate the arrival of that day.

If the difficulty becomes very high, it will actually increase the value of each Bitcoin, as the supply becomes more limited. The supply remains the same: 50 Bitcoins every 10 minutes. But the distribution of GPUs is far less uniform than that of CPUs, so the generated Bitcoins will only reward 20% of the people, not 100%.

I don’t mean to sound like a socialist; I don’t mind wealth concentration, but at the moment, by distributing this money to 100% of the population rather than 20%, we can achieve greater growth.

Moreover, the longer we delay the GPU arms race, the more mature the OpenCL library will become, and more people will have OpenCL-compatible graphics cards. If we see someone overusing GPUs from the difficulty factor, we can reconsider this OpenCL matter. Perhaps my efforts to maintain the 'purity' of GPUs are nearing their end, but so far, it has been effective."

This raises a question: Did Hanyecz give up his Bitcoin wealth as a form of penance for accelerating the centralization of Bitcoin mining?

Only Hanyecz knows the answer, but he may never tell us, as he rarely gives interviews anymore. After all, why bring it up again? "Bitcoin Pizza Day" always reminds him that he traded a fortune worth billions of dollars in the future for a few ordinary pizzas.

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