Eight years ago today, on 22 May 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz of Jacksonville Florida made history by purchasing two large pizzas from Papa Johns with 10,000 Bitcoins. This was considered a major milestone as it was possibly the first time that Bitcoin was used to purchase goods from a major company. Today, ‘Bitcoin pizza day’ is proof that Bitcoin could be used as a currency.
Hanyecz had mined the Bitcoins to purchase the pizza on his personal computer. This is a feat that is now impossible, mining Bitcoins on a personal computer costs more in electricity than the minuscule amount of Bitcoin it produces. Nowadays, expensive specialized mining rigs made with application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are required to have any chance of mining Bitcoin profitably.
The pizza was purchased with the help of a forum user on Bitcointalk; Laslo Hanyecz sent the Bitcoins to the forum user and then the forum user purchased the pizza with their card. Bitcointalk continues to be the most popular Bitcoin and cryptocurrency forum to this day, and was started by Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious founder of Bitcoin who disappeared shortly after it launched.
Many would think that Laszlo Hanyecz would have regrets over using 10,000 Bitcoins to buy a couple of pizzas, since today they are worth an astonishing USD 84 million. Coindesk released a pizza day tracker which updates in real-time how much the 10,000 Bitcoins used to buy the pizza are now worth, expected to result in cringing and astonishment from most.
He doesn’t appear to have any, however, he was stoked just to be able to use the Bitcoins to buy pizza since he had gotten them for free by mining on his computer and they were barely worth anything at the time.
At the time the infamous pizzas were purchased, each Bitcoin was worth roughly 3/10 of a US penny. This fact help illustrates how enormous the rise in Bitcoin’s price has been. As of this writing, each bitcoin is worth USD 8,200, an incredible rise of 273,300,000% since pizza day. There is probably no other asset in the world that has risen at such a pace as Bitcoin has in the long term.
Now Bitcoin can be used to buy anything in the world and is accepted on at least a thousand different retail websites, but it all began with one man in Florida using Bitcoin to buy pizza.
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