Bitcoin Pizza

Once upon a time in the distant past—fourteen years and some change as I write this, an eternity in digital time—someone bought a pizza with Bitcoin.

If you know much at all about crypto, hearing that someone spent Bitcoin on pizza sounds kind of crazy. The price of BTC (Bitcoin’s stock ticker symbol) has seen a meteoric rise to near-astronomical values compared to where it all started… but did anyone really know that would happen back in 2010?

Nah, not really. Back then it was incredible just to find someone who would be happy to transact in BTC, so that’s exactly what Laszlo Hanyecz did on May 22nd, 2010. Hanyecz was a computer programmer involved in early Bitcoin mining, and he was one of the very early adopters of using GPUs to mine new coins.

Now, Papa John’s pizza is sort of trash. It’s not really all that great, but hey, pizza is pizza, and when you’re desperate, you’ll take what you can get. Besides, these crypto coins weren’t exactly liquid at the time. So, if you could put yourself in Hanyecz’s shoes, you might be able to stretch your imagination and consider trading one BTC for a Papa John’s pizza.

Incidentally, as I write this, the price of one Bitcoin is about $66,000, give or take a few wiggles up or down.

One Bitcoin for a pizza would be rough, but that’s not what Hanyecz did. He needed two pizzas! But also (and more importantly), the price wasn’t one BTC for one pizza. Instead…

Actually, go ahead and sit down for a second.

Hanyecz bought two Papa John's pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoins.

We need to do a little math. $66,000 per each BTC… whew. We need to add four zeroes to multiply by ten thousand, meaning that our dude spent $660,000,000 on those two Papa John’s pizzas. I want to keep emphasizing that these were not phenomenal New York-style pizzas, or Naples-style margherita with fresh basil and mozzarella.

Nope. Papa John’s. 660 million dollars.

Nowadays, Bitcoin Pizza Day is a real thing among crypto enthusiasts. It’s probably not ever going to be significant among pizza enthusiasts, though. Papa John’s, people.

Bitcoin Pizza Day commemorates that May 22nd, 2010 date, since this was the first ever commercial transaction using the currency. Since then, we’ve seen wild fluctuations in the price of BTC, highlighting the difficulty in using the coin to purchase things. Price stability is one of the main things you really need in a currency.

Still, Bitcoin has proven to be an effective store of wealth so far. It seems very unlikely that we’ll see anything like the exponential rise we’ve seen so far, since trees don’t really grow to the sky and there are very real limits to how valuable things can be. Nevertheless, it’s intriguing to watch the evolution of a very fringe, very technically oriented idea start to spread worldwide.

I certainly wouldn’t describe myself as a crypto bro—a derogatory term for someone so invested in the world of crypto that they can’t see any of the risks or downsides. At the same time, I recognize that there is tremendous potential in a new currency that isn’t controlled by one government, and the technology itself is an entirely different conversation. Suffice it to say, blockchain technology is incredibly useful in a lot of different ways that have nothing to do with merely transferring money.

I’ll have a bit more to say about crypto in the future. I hope to shed some light on the space with a balanced flashlight, illuminating things without an agenda. In the meantime, please don’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars on subpar pizza!

Have you ever spent or bought any cryptocurrency? Could you see yourself in the shoes of Laszlo Hanyecz? Most importantly, what’s your favorite type of pizza?