Eight year ago, on May 22, someone bought 2 pizzas and paid 10.000 Bitcoins. And everybody who are connected with cryptocurrency world celebrate the anniversary of the purchase of pizza for bitcoins, which became the first commodity purchased for virtual currency.
Bitcoin Pizza
On this day exactly eight years ago a Florida programmer Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10.000 Bitcoins for two pizzas. At the time of purchase, the price of this dinner was just $ 25, but at the current exchange rate the cost of pizza would be more than $ 80 million.
Bitcoin rate was just a fraction of a cent at the time of purchase, and no shops accepted it as a method of payment. So Laszlo Hanyecz posted a note on the Bitcointalk forum:
“I’ll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas.. like maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day. I like having left over pizza to nibble on later. You can make the pizza yourself and bring it to my house or order it for me from a delivery place, but what I’m aiming for is getting food delivered in exchange for bitcoins where I don’t have to order or prepare it myself, kind of like ordering a ‘breakfast platter’ at a hotel or something, they just bring you something to eat and you’re happy!”
Hanyecz and Sturdivant about the pizza purchase
“It wasn’t like Bitcoins had any value back then, so the idea of trading them for a pizza was incredibly cool,” noted Hanyecz during an interview with the New York Times in 2013 “No one knew it was going to get so big.”
Also the journalists found out that he had sold the remains of his bitcoins at a rate of one dollar and earned about four thousand. “That was enough to get a new computer and a couple of new video cards,” he said. “So I’d say I ended up on top.”
He added that he did not continue to work as a mining officer. This was one of the few interviews with Hanyecz. In 2017 Reddit users to contact him, but they failed.
As it turned out, the second participant of this historical transaction, Jeremy Sturdivant, put the bitcoins in the wallet, and then paid for travel to the US with Bitcoins.
“As they say, ‘give a man a pizza, he’ll eat for a day; let him buy pizza with bitcoin, revolutionize the economy,'” Sturdivant said. “Something like that anyway.”
Many companies associated with the crypto currency, and Bitcoin enthusiasts today are buying pizza to celebrate a day that, in their opinion, changed the status of bitcoin. In their social networking accounts, they post photos with “holiday symbols” and pizza, give comparisons with what would happen if the purchase happened in 2018. For example, the cryptocurrency exchange Huobi released a special short video, and created a separate account in Twitter and posts the “pizza rate”.
Image by Huobi
