Today In Bitcoin History: The Curious Case of Bitcoin Pizza Day

Today is officially the 15th Bitcoin Pizza Day.
Every year, around the world May 22nd is celebrated by the crypto community as “Pizza Day” for a very good reason.

Back in 2010 Bitcoin was still in its infancy and only known to a handful of cypherpunks who were mining bulks of without being able to do much with it yet. The white paper was released in 2008 and the first block was mined on 3-January-2009 but still, in 2010 there was no use case for it in the physical world and no merchants were accepting it yet.

This was about to change and one bold action was all it was needed.

On May 18th 2010 a user on Bitcointalk (the early forum for crypto enthusiasts) known as Laszlo Hanyecz, made an offer to pay 10 000 Bitcoin for a couple of pizzas, just to be able to say that he bought something with Bitcoin.

**you can find the original post** **here**

Even though this seemed like a joke at the time, after few days of deliberation on the forum someone agreed to take him on his offer. The forum is still in the public domain, so all of this can be traced by time and dates.
And so, on 22nd May 2010 Laszlo posted a confirmation that the trade happened, the pizzas were delivered and thus, the first-ever transaction of Bitcoin for physical goods has happened. It’s a historical event, even if it was just a novelty at the time. Bitcoin was still in its infancy.

In hindsight, this seemed like a very generous offer at the time, as it amounted to $41 as per the value of Bitcoin back then, but very soon Bitcoin started gaining popularity and then the price updates began. People started posting comments on the thread with regular updates on the value of the 2 pizzas. Very soon people were astonished by the value of these pizzas rising to what seemed astronomical levels, one user feeling sick over the figure of $70,000 back in 2011 and another one joking if this could one day be the first million dollar pizza… (well, technically two pizzas…)

Surely these will one day be the billion dollar pizzas and I hope this day comes soon for all of us who are involved with crypto and Bitcoin in particular!