On May 22, 2010, a Florida programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz posted a message to the Bitcoin Talk forum that would go down in history. "I'll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas," he wrote. The first recorded real-world Bitcoin transaction was about to happen.
A fellow forum member took him up on the offer, ordered two Papa John's pizzas, and collected 10,000 BTC. The transaction was worth about $41 at the time.
At a Bitcoin price of $60,000, those 10,000 BTC would be worth $600 million. At Bitcoin's all-time high, they were worth over $680 million. No pizza in history has ever been this expensive — or this consequential.
"I wanted to do something people would remember. I was happy to be part of the Bitcoin story in any way I could." — Laszlo Hanyecz
Every year on May 22nd, the Bitcoin community celebrates this moment. It's a reminder of how far the network has come — from an experiment with no economic foundation to a $1 trillion asset class.
Laszlo wasn't just spending Bitcoin — he was mining it. He was one of the earliest GPU miners, earning thousands of BTC per day at almost zero cost. The real lesson of Pizza Day isn't that he should have held. It's that early network participants were rewarded in ways that seemed modest at the time and proved extraordinary in hindsight. The earlier you start, the more time your Bitcoin has to work for you.
Don't wait for the next Pizza Day to wish you had started earlier.
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