Bitcoin fans on Twitter celebrated this historic moment, "the first real purchase" with Bitcoin, and experts etched this story into the memory of the Internet community with headlines about the infamous Bitcoin Pizza Purchase, now valued at over $1 billion.
But what if I told you that Hanyecz spent nearly 10 times that amount of Bitcoin after this historic purchase? And what if I told you that perhaps Hanyecz did so as a clear atonement for his far more significant contributions to Bitcoin during its uncertain early stage?
He is a Pioneer of Bitcoin Technology
The obscurity of Hanyecz's Pizza Day acquisition has overshadowed two significant contributions he made to Bitcoin's early technical development.
The first of these occurred on April 19, 2010, just a few days after Hanyecz registered on Bitcointalk, a forum founded by Satoshi Nakamoto, which is (and still is) a gathering place for the Bitcoin tech intellectuals. Hanyecz created the first MacOS client for Bitcoin Core, the original implementation software and still dominant for nodes supporting the Bitcoin network.
Satoshi originally coded Bitcoin for Windows and Linux, but Hanyecz's innovation allowed MacOS devices to run this software. His contributions laid the groundwork for all Bitcoin wallets supporting MacOS and subsequent applications.
But perhaps even more significantly, Hanyecz discovered that he could mine Bitcoin using his computer's graphics card (GPU). Up until this point, early users had been using their computer's central processing unit (CPU) to mine Bitcoin, and since GPUs are many times more powerful than CPUs for this task, this innovation accelerated Bitcoin mining much faster than Satoshi had anticipated.
"Updated the Mac OS X binary file... It will use your GPU to generate Bitcoin. This is really effective if you have a good GPU like NVIDIA 8800 or something similar," Hanyecz wrote in a Bitcointalk post on May 10, 2010.
This discovery sparked the first digital gold rush of Bitcoin. The total Bitcoin hashrate skyrocketed by 130,000% by the end of the year, and for the first time, Bitcoin miners began building small-scale mining farms. These setups - built in basements and attics, garages, and warehouses - are the prototypes for the industrial-scale Bitcoin mining farms that dominate the Bitcoin network today.
Hanyecz's invention was so influential that it earned him genuine support from Satoshi Nakamoto himself. And perhaps the subsequent conversation inspired Hanyecz's famous Pizza Day purchase.
"A major attraction for new users is that anyone with a computer can generate some free coins," Satoshi wrote to Hanyecz. "GPUs will limit the momentum to those with high-end GPU hardware. It is inevitable that GPU computing clusters will eventually claim all the coins generated, but I don't want that day to come too soon."
In a 2019 interview for Bitcoin Magazine, Hanyecz told me that he had "stopped promoting [GPU mining] after that."
Hanyecz said, "I thought, 'Wow, I feel like I ruined your project, man. Sorry about that, buddy.' He worried that some people might be discouraged because they couldn't mine a block with a CPU."
Perhaps this conversation prompted Hanyecz to make the infamous offer of 10,000 BTC for two large Papa John's pizzas on that fateful day in May 15 years ago. In fact, he made this offer more than once. In the 2019 interview, Hanyecz told me that he spent nearly 100,000 BTC the following year.
"I spent [all the Bitcoin] on pizza a long time ago," Hanyecz wrote in a Bitcointalk post in February 2014. "Apart from a little change, I spent all the money I mined. As you all know, the difficulty increases to adjust to the hash power, so eventually mining was no longer worth it to me."
Looking at the Bitcoin address that Hanyecz listed in his first post on Bitcointalk, Hanyecz received and spent 81,432 BTC from this address from April to November 2010. This amount is now worth just over $8.6 billion.
The wallet balance history of Laszlo Hanyecz in 2010 | Source: Mempool.space
There is no way to verify whether Hanyecz spent this money on pizza, other goods, or if he simply gifted Bitcoin to new Bitcointalk members, a common practice at the time when Bitcoin was nearly worthless. But he mentioned in his original thread about buying pizza that it was "an open offer," although he declined in August, saying, "I really can't afford to keep doing that because I can't generate thousands of coins a day anymore. Thank you to everyone who bought pizza for me."
The initial purchase, not counting the repeat purchases that seemingly occurred afterward, would be enough to make any sober person lose sleep at night when Bitcoin rises above $100,000. But at least in 2019, Hanyecz endured this challenge with humor. In his view, he performed culinary alchemy, transforming his electricity and computing power into a cheap dinner. He did not know that Bitcoin would be worth what it is today, so this transaction was a win in his book.
"A trade happened because both sides thought they were getting a good deal," he said. "I felt like I was beating the internet, getting free food. I thought, 'Wow, I linked these GPUs together, now I'm going to mine twice as fast. I'm just going to eat free food; I'll never have to buy food again..."
"I mean, I coded this thing and mined Bitcoin, and I felt like I had won the internet that day. I got pizza for contributing to an open-source project. Usually, hobbies are things that consume time and money, and in this case, my hobby helped me get dinner."