"Never regret, felt like I won the internet that day"

Written by: Hill Far, Centreless

Published in March 2025

The pizza purchased at that time

On May 18, 2010, at 12:35 PM, a user with the ID Laszlo posted a bounty on the Bitcoin forum, willing to exchange 10,000 bitcoins for two large pizzas. The seller could make them himself or order takeout, and in the post, he detailed his taste preferences. He had joined the Bitcoin Talk Forum initiated by Bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, on April 16.

Bitcoin had just emerged in 2010, and people were still relatively unfamiliar with this so-called "digital cryptocurrency" existing on the internet, let alone the concept of trading it. Therefore, the post did not immediately attract much attention, with only a few users expressing willingness to buy him pizza, but the transactions could not be completed as they were not in the United States.

At that time, 10,000 bitcoins were worth about $30, which made Laszlo doubt whether he had offered too little. It wasn't until four days later, on May 22, that Laszlo replied on the forum stating he had successfully bought the pizza and shared a photo of it. May 22 thus became known as "Bitcoin Pizza Day."

The historical significance of this transaction is that it was the first transaction since the birth of Bitcoin, indicating that Bitcoin had acquired the function of currency for trading, rather than just being stored online. Of course, this first offline transaction of Bitcoin also had an experimental nature, testing whether Bitcoin truly had practical utility as "currency."

In a 2019 interview with Bitcoin Magazine, when asked why he did this, Laszlo stated, "I wanted to buy pizza with Bitcoin because, for me, it was free pizza. I mean, I created this thing and mined Bitcoin, and I felt like I won the internet that day—I got pizza by contributing to an open-source project. Usually, hobbies cost time and money, but in this case, my hobby bought me dinner."

Laszlo

Laszlo's "experiment" was also related to the ease of mining at that time. As a programmer, he was among the first to engage with Bitcoin and was one of the first to discover the ease of mining, reportedly mining tens of thousands of bitcoins quickly.

According to the Blockchain explorer OXT charting tool, Laszlo's wallet saw more funds flowing in starting in May 2010, with a peak balance of 20,962 BTC that month. It can be seen that the 10,000 bitcoins spent on that pizza were quickly replenished through mining (his wallet reached a historical high of 43,854 BTC in June 2010, after which BTC slowly flowed out; of course, he may have had more than one wallet).

After the Bitcoin pizza transaction, as the price of Bitcoin soared, netizens continuously updated the latest market price of those two pizzas in the comments, and Laszlo also commented that he did not expect Bitcoin to rise so quickly.

Even as Bitcoin became increasingly valuable, Laszlo Hanyecz later stated in an interview that he did not feel regret over that pizza transaction and did not lose sleep over it. In his words, he was quite happy during that time, as he could get free pizza just by using a graphics card.

In fact, after completing the first transaction, Laszlo Hanyecz began to use Bitcoin frequently for payments, spending about 100,000 bitcoins in total, worth over $4 billion today. The pizza he purchased for about $30 with 10,000 bitcoins is now worth over $260 million.

Laszlo himself has remained relatively low-key; he does not have his own social media accounts, and it is unknown whether he became wealthy because of Bitcoin.

However, we can continue to follow the fate of those 10,000 bitcoins after Laszlo purchased the pizza.

The seller who made the deal with Laszlo Hanyecz was a 19-year-old boy from California named Jeremy Sturdivant. He had been involved with Bitcoin since 2009 and had mined a few thousand bitcoins himself. Jeremy was actually an early consumer of Bitcoin, using it for payments online or offline whenever he had the chance. He mentioned that he spent those 10,000 bitcoins on traveling with his girlfriend.

In 2018, Jeremy admitted in an interview that he never thought Bitcoin would appreciate so much in the future. Even so, he does not regret spending those bitcoins; he feels that the pizza transaction brought him a total income of $400, which appreciated tenfold, making the deal quite worthwhile.

Later, the price trend of Bitcoin was evident to all. In May 2023, the market and capital remained confident in Bitcoin and looked forward to the next halving period.

Hanyecz has also maintained this positive attitude. This may be because since joining the Bitcoin open-source community in 2010, his approach to Bitcoin has not changed. For him, it is still just a hobby rather than a profession.

The low-key Hanyecz has continued to participate as a Bitcoin enthusiast.

"Honestly, I feel a bit detached because there is too much attention," he said. "I don't want that kind of attention, and I certainly don't want people to think I'm Satoshi Nakamoto… I just think it's better to treat it as a hobby. I have a normal job; I won't work on Bitcoin full-time. I don't want it to become my responsibility and career. I'm happy to be involved to this extent."

Bitcoin Magazine reported on May 22, 2019, that they were also glad Hanyecz could be involved. "After all, he provided us with Bitcoin Core on MacOS and GPU mining—along with the pizza meme, which, while it may not be as important or impressive as Hanyecz's other contributions, has made May 22 memorable (and delicious) for the community every year."

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。