The Legendary Starting Point: The Meeting of Two Pizzas and 10,000 BTC

On May 18, 2010, a young programmer from Florida named Laszlo posted on a Bitcoin forum: "I want to exchange 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas, preferably large ones!" Four days later, 19-year-old Jeremy Sturdivant took the order and used a credit card to order two Papa John's pizzas delivered to Laszlo's house. This transaction was permanently recorded in block 57043 of the blockchain. At that time, Bitcoin was only worth $0.004, and today, the value of those 10,000 bitcoins is enough to buy an island—but Laszlo has never regretted it: "That was the coolest pizza I ever had."

[The Gift of History: From Code Experiment to Value Revolution]

Pizza Day is not only a commemoration of the "creation myth" in the cryptocurrency world but also symbolizes the ultimate ideal of cryptocurrencies: to make code a symbol of value circulating in the real world. As Bitcoin moved from geek forums to Wall Street, evolving from a pizza transaction to a trillion-dollar digital gold, this experiment has overturned humanity's understanding of money, trust, and decentralization. Just as Satoshi Nakamoto left the headline of The Times in the genesis block: "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"—Bitcoin was born with the gene to combat the traditional financial system.