On 22 May 2010, a programmer in Florida named Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas. At Bitcoin's price of $78,900 today, people love pointing out what that meal is worth now.

Almost everyone tells this story as a joke about the dumbest purchase in history. I think that reading gets it completely backwards.

In May 2010 Bitcoin had no price. Not a low price. No price. There was no exchange where you could sell it, no merchant who would take it, no way to convert it into anything you could eat. It was a number in a program that a few hundred people on a forum found interesting.

What Laszlo did was prove the number could become dinner. Somebody on the other side of that trade had to believe those coins would be worth something later, and somebody had to be willing to hand over real food to find out. That was the first time Bitcoin touched the physical world.

Before that day it was a cryptography experiment. After it, it was money that at least two people agreed on.

The thing worth noticing is how long it stayed almost worthless afterwards. Bitcoin did not go vertical the next week. It spent years being dismissed, mocked, declared dead in print more than four hundred separate times by one running count. People who bought early mostly sold early, because holding something everyone tells you is fake requires a kind of stubbornness that has nothing to do with intelligence.

That is the part the pizza joke hides. The hard bit was never buying. It was sitting there for years while friends and family asked when you would stop wasting money on internet coins.

Ethereum at $2,491 went through its own version of this. So did BNB at $751.51, which launched in 2017 as a token on somebody else's chain and was widely treated as a discount coupon for trading fees rather than anything durable.

Every one of these went through a period where owning it made you sound naive at dinner. That period is not a bug in the story. It is where the returns came from, because the price was low precisely because the belief was rare.

Now look at where the conversation sits. Governments hold Bitcoin on public balance sheets. Regulated funds hold it for pension money. Banks that called it fraud in 2017 sell exposure to it in 2026. The people who were mocked turned out to be early, and the mockery itself was a feature of being early.

Which brings the uncomfortable question forward rather than backward.

The pizza is not the lesson. The lesson is that whatever is currently getting laughed at in this space will either be worthless or obvious, and there is no reliable way to tell which from inside the joke.

So what are you currently laughing at?

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Personal opinion only. Not a recommendation and not an offer to trade anything. Do your own research.

#Bitcoin #Crypto