Glossary / Culture & history
Bitcoin Pizza Day
- Definition
- Bitcoin Pizza Day is May 22, the anniversary of the 2010 trade in which Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoin for two delivered pizzas, the first documented purchase of goods.
The pizzas cost about 41 dollars, which prices the coin at roughly four tenths of a cent. Confirmed in block 57,043, the trade is the moment bitcoin stopped being a number on a screen and became something a person would accept for a physical object. Everything since has been an argument about the exchange rate.
How it works
The pizza trade began as a forum request, not a purchase, and that detail is the interesting part.
On May 18, 2010, Hanyecz posted on the bitcointalk forum offering 10,000 coins to anyone who would have pizza delivered to his house in Florida. He was not buying from a merchant. No shop accepted bitcoin, no exchange rate was published anywhere, and no payment processor existed, so the only way to spend the currency was to find a human being willing to place an order with a credit card and take coins in return.
Four days later someone did. Jeremy Sturdivant, a teenager in California, ordered two large pizzas to Hanyecz's address and collected the 10,000 coins. The whole arrangement rested on the two of them trusting each other for a few hours, which is a fair summary of what commerce in bitcoin looked like in 2010.
Hanyecz was not a bystander in the project. He had written some of the earliest code for mining on graphics cards, which is how he came to hold so many coins in the first place, and he has said he traded away a large multiple of that first order on pizza over the following months. He also repeated the stunt in February 2018 using the Lightning Network, paying a fraction of a single coin for two more pizzas and demonstrating that the payment problem he improvised around in 2010 had a real solution.
Where you see it
May 22 is the one date the whole bitcoin community celebrates, and it is used for two opposite arguments.
The popular framing is the worst trade in history. At a price of 100,000 dollars a coin, those two pizzas cost a billion dollars, and the number gets recalculated every year for headlines. It makes a good joke and a bad lesson, because in May 2010 there was no market to sell 10,000 coins into. The alternative to spending them was not becoming a billionaire; it was holding an untested experiment that most people who owned it lost, forgot, or handed to Mt. Gox.
The other framing is the one that holds up. A currency needs someone to accept it before anything else about it matters, and Pizza Day is the day that happened. The date also gives you a clean measuring stick for denominations: 10,000 coins is a trillion satoshis, while at a price of 100,000 dollars the same 41 dollars buys 41,000 of them. If you are new, that arithmetic is more useful than the joke.