For Bitcoin users, May 22 (the so-called Bitcoin Pizza Day) is a day of great indulgence.

Today, Bitcoin enthusiasts around the world are enjoying pizza, celebrating the famous pizza ordered by Laszlo Hanyecz on May 22, 2010. On this day 15 years ago, early Bitcoin developer and miner Hanyecz paid another early Bitcoin user 10,000 Bitcoins in exchange for two large Papa John’s pizzas. This marked the first real-world purchase of this cryptocurrency, just a year after its inception.

Bitcoin enthusiasts feel both sympathy and celebration for this greasy Thanksgiving simulation themed around Bitcoin, as the value of those 10,000 BTC is now over $1 billion.

But what most people don’t realize is that Hanyecz may have spent up to 79,000 Bitcoins on subsequent pizza purchases, which today would be worth over $8.7 billion. And the loss of billions of dollars still lingers with one question amidst people's shocked emotions: How did Hanyecz initially acquire these Bitcoins?

“I’ve spent all my money on pizza”: The untold story of the Bitcoin purchases on Pizza Day

When I interviewed Hanyecz in 2019, he mentioned that he spent nearly 100,000 BTC on pizza in 2010. At that time, he didn’t think much of those transactions.

After all, Bitcoin was virtually worthless at the time. Hanyecz pointed out that Bitcointalk users (a popular forum for discussing Bitcoin, which Hanyecz used to promote the original Bitcoin Pizza Day purchase) would give away hundreds or thousands of Bitcoins to new users.

Laszlo does not feel troubled by this experience. He describes it as “winning the internet that day,” because his “hobby bought him dinner.”

In fact, he was very satisfied with the transaction, so he kept the offer from May 22, 2010, until August 4, 2010, after which he posted on Bitcointalk saying, “I can’t keep doing this because I can’t [mine].

Earning thousands of coins every day is no longer enough.” (He will explain later why he cannot do this).

In the same post, he thanked “everyone who has ever bought him pizza,” suggesting that he purchased more pizza during the May to August period.

Four years later, Hanyecz recounted his past Bitcoin wealth in another post. “I spent all my money on pizza,” he said, attaching a link to the Bitcoin address listed in his first Bitcointalk post to prove it.

The wallet shows that from the creation date of April 10, 2010, to August 4, 2010 (the day he stopped publicly trading Bitcoins for pizza), Laszlo sent over 79,000 Bitcoins. Ironically, at the current Bitcoin to USD exchange rate, the Bitcoins in that wallet are now only enough to buy one large pizza, and the last significant amount of Bitcoins it held was actually emptied in June 2011. The total outflow from that wallet slightly exceeded 81,432 Bitcoins.

Where did Hanyecz acquire all the Bitcoins for Bitcoin Pizza Day?

In 2009 and 2010, the Bitcoin block reward was 50 BTC per block (plus transaction fees). Since a Bitcoin block is mined approximately every ten minutes, this meant that Hanyecz's wealth of 81,432 BTC accounted for about 1.5% of all mined Bitcoins at that time. So, how did he accumulate this wealth?

Hanyecz was a prolific early developer of Bitcoin. He not only designed the first MacOS client for Bitcoin but was also the first, apart from Bitcoin’s anonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto, to discover that Bitcoin miners could use GPUs to generate new coins.

Hanyecz made his discovery public in May 2010. Before that, Bitcoin miners were using the processing units (CPUs) of laptops or desktops to mine Bitcoin, but GPUs upgraded this to miners with 10 times the computing power to generate new Bitcoins.

This discovery opened the floodgates, and by the end of 2010, the computational power protecting the Bitcoin network increased by 1,300 times. Ironically, the intensifying competition was precisely the reason Hanyecz could no longer “generate thousands of coins every day” as he stated in his August 2010 Bitcointalk post.

Was Bitcoin Pizza Day the result of Laszlo Hanyecz's communication with Satoshi Nakamoto?

With the opening of Pandora's box, Hanyecz's discovery also brought polite rebuke from Satoshi Nakamoto himself. As Nathaniel Popper detailed in his book (Digital Gold), “Satoshi had complex feelings about the early introduction of GPU mining,” and this Bitcoin founder seemed to have anticipated it long ago.

Satoshi sent the following via email to Laszlo:

One major attraction for new users was that anyone with a computer could generate some free coins. As the user base reached 5,000, this incentive might begin to wane, but it was still effective at the time. GPUs would prematurely limit the incentive mechanism to users with high-end GPU hardware. Eventually, GPU computing clusters would monopolize all generated coins, which was inevitable, but I didn’t want to accelerate that day’s arrival. If the difficulty became very high, the value of each coin would increase to some extent as the supply became more limited. The supply remained the same: 50 coins every 10 minutes. However, the distribution of GPUs was not uniform, so generated coins would only reward 20% of people joining the network instead of 100%. I didn’t want to sound like a socialist; I didn’t care whether wealth was concentrated, but for now, distributing this money to 100% of people would yield more growth than distributing it to 20%. Additionally, the longer we delayed the GPU arms race, the more mature the OpenCL libraries became, and the more people who owned OpenCL-compatible graphics cards. If we looked at it from the perspective of the difficulty factor, if someone excessively used GPUs, then we could certainly re-enable OpenCL. Perhaps my efforts to maintain the purity of GPUs have run out of time. So far, my efforts have still been effective.


Thus, we face a pressing question: Did Hanyecz give up his Bitcoin wealth to atone for accelerating the centralization of Bitcoin mining?

Only Hanyecz knows the answer, but he is unlikely to reveal it, as he rarely (if ever) gives interviews now. After all, since the current topic—Bitcoin Pizza Day—constantly reminds him that he exchanged billions of dollars in future wealth for mediocre pizza, why would he?