The "madman" who bought pizza with 10,000 Bitcoins joked: This is my best investment.

Original Title: "Laszlo, the man who bought pizza with 10,000 Bitcoins: never regretted it, feels like he won the internet that day"

Original author: Hill Far, Centreless

This article was published in March 2025

The pizza purchased at that time

At 12:35 a.m. on May 18, 2010, a user with the ID Laszlo posted a bounty post on the Bitcoin forum, offering to exchange 10,000 bitcoins for two large pizzas, and the seller could make his own or order takeout for him, in which he also detailed his taste preferences. Previously, on April 16, he joined the Bitcoin Talk Forum, a forum launched by Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto.

In 2010, Bitcoin had just appeared, and people were still relatively unfamiliar with the so-called "digital cryptocurrency" that existed on the network, let alone the concept of transactions. Therefore, the post did not cause much reaction immediately after it was published, and only a few users expressed their willingness to buy him pizza, but the transaction could not be made because the person was not in the United States.

At the time, 10,000 BTC was worth about $30, so it made Laszlo wonder if he was bidding too low. It wasn't until 4 days later, on May 22, that Laszlo replied on the forum that he had successfully bought the pizza and posted a photo of the pizza he bought. May 22 is also known as "Bticoin Pizza Day"

The historic significance of this transaction is the first transaction since the birth of Bitcoin, which means that Bitcoin has since had the function of trading money, not just being stored on the network. Of course, this first offline transaction of bitcoin is also somewhat experimental, that is, to test whether bitcoin has the function of "currency" in real use.

According to a 2019 interview with Laszlo by Bitcoin Magazine, when asked why he did it, Laszlo said, "I wanted to buy pizza with Bitcoin because it was free pizza for me. I mean, I wrote this thing and mined bitcoin and felt like I won the internet that day – I got pizza by contributing to open source projects. Usually hobbies cost time and money, and in this case, my hobby bought dinner for me."

Laszlo

The "experiment" conducted by Laszlo was also related to the ease of mining back then. As a programmer, he was among the first to come into contact with Bitcoin and was reportedly one of the individuals who discovered the bottleneck in mining. It is said that he quickly mined tens of thousands of Bitcoins. According to the Blockchain explorer OXT charting tool, Laszlo's wallet saw more funds inflow starting in May 2010, with a peak balance of 20962 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 43854 BTC in June 2010, after which BTC slowly flowed out; of course, he may have more than one wallet).

After the incident of Bitcoin trading for pizza, as the price of Bitcoin soared, netizens continuously updated the latest market prices of these two pizzas in the posts. Laszlo also commented that he did not expect Bitcoin to rise so quickly. Even though Bitcoin became more valuable later, in the face of that pizza transaction incident, the later Laszlo Hanyecz stated in an interview that he did not feel regret for this consumption, nor did he lose sleep over it. In his words, he was quite happy during that time, after all, he could get free pizza just by using a graphics card.

In fact, after completing the first transaction, Laszlo Hanyecz began to pay frequently in Bitcoin, spending about 100,000 BTC before and after, worth more than $4 billion now. The pizza that Laszlo bought for about $30 worth of 10,000 bitcoins at the time is now worth more than $260 million.

Laszlo himself has kept a low profile, he doesn't have his own social media accounts, and it's unclear whether he's become rich thanks to Bitcoin. However, you can continue to follow the whereabouts of the 10,000 bitcoins after Laszlo bought the pizza. The seller who struck the deal with Laszlo Hanyecz was a California boy named Jeremy Stevent, who was 19 years old at the time. He has been involved with Bitcoin since 2009 and has mined thousands of bitcoins himself. Jeremy was actually an early consumer of Bitcoin, and he used Bitcoin to pay online or offline whenever he had the opportunity. According to him, he spent the 10,000 bitcoins on a trip with his girlfriend.

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

Later, the price trend of bitcoin was obvious to all, and in May 2023, the market and capital are still confident in bitcoin and looking forward to the next halving period. Hanyecz has always maintained this positive attitude as well. This may be because the way he treats Bitcoin hasn't changed since he joined the Bitcoin open source community in 2010. For him, it's still just a hobby, not a career.

The low-key Hanyecz has since participated as a Bitcoin enthusiast. "To be honest, I feel a bit out of it because there’s too much attention," he said. "I don’t want to attract 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, and I don’t work full-time with Bitcoin. 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 are also pleased that Hanyecz could be involved. "After all, he provided us with Bitcoin Core on MacOS and GPU mining - and the pizza meme, although it may not be as important or impressive as Hanyecz's other contributions, it has made May 22 memorable (and delicious) for the community."

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