It was the seventh annual Bitcoin Pizza Day on Monday, which, if you haven’t heard, is the day nerds celebrate the very first bitcoin transaction. On May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz used 10,000 bitcoin to purchase two pizzas. Seven years later, those pizzas would now be worth more than $20 million.
Compare that to Bitcoin Pizza Day two years ago when the bitcoin pizzas were worth a measly $2.3 million.
In this way, bitcoin enthusiasts have been tracking the exponential growth of the cryptocurrency—because who doesn’t like money and pizza? At this moment, bitcoin is seeing a particularly large surge in value. CoinDesk estimated bitcoin’s value at more than $2,200 on Tuesday. You don’t need to be a math genius to know that’s a vastly greater sum than the $41 valuation it had back in 2010.
And back then, you couldn’t actually buy a pizza using bitcoin; you had to trade your bitcoin with one of the few people using the cryptocurrency. Here’s the original call for pizza Hanyecz posted on a bitcoin forum in 2010:
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!
I like things like onions, peppers, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, pepperoni, etc.. just standard stuff no weird fish topping or anything like that. I also like regular cheese pizzas which may be cheaper to prepare or otherwise acquire.
If you’re interested please let me know and we can work out a deal.
Thanks,
Laszlo
But, let’s be real, most people weren’t buying deep-dish meat lovers’ pies on Silk Road, the online black market where bitcoin proved to be especially useful in its infancy. Now that it’s lost some of that initial sketchiness (and still none of its mystery), you can use the cryptocurrency for totally normal, everyday items. According to Business Insider, you can now buy drugs, guns, and tiny cannons with bitcoin. Not bad considering no one really knows how it works.
