Engineer Hassan Abbas

On May 18, 2010, a Florida programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz posted a now-legendary request on the Bitcointalk forum. He had mined about 10,000 bitcoins using nothing more than his computer’s CPU—back when mining was that simple. He wanted to do something that had never been done before: use bitcoin to buy a physical, tangible item in the real world.
His message was straightforward: “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.” He offered to send the coins to anyone willing to order him two Papa John’s pizzas delivered to his house. At the time, 10,000 BTC was worth around $41—just enough to cover two pizzas.
Days passed with no takers. Some forum members joked that the coins were worthless. Others lived too far away. Then, on May 22, a British user dubbed “jercos” accepted the challenge. He called a Papa John’s in Florida, paid roughly $25 with his credit card, and had two pizzas delivered to Laszlo. Laszlo triumphantly posted photos of the boxes, onion slices, and toppings. “I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza,” he wrote. And so, the first real-world Bitcoin transaction was complete—utterly mundane, and utterly historic.
Here’s the part that feels intractable, almost impossible to process, for anyone born into the modern crypto era: those 10,000 bitcoins now represent a fortune that defies ordinary logic. At Bitcoin’s peak, that pizza order was worth well over $600 million. Even in quieter markets, it’s routinely valued in the hundreds of millions. The two pizzas—which arrived in a cardboard box just like any other Tuesday—became the most expensive meal in human history, retroactively.
For the new generation, the intractability sits exactly there: you grow up knowing Bitcoin as digital gold, a trillion-dollar asset class, something people store in hardware wallets and treat like a retirement plan. So the idea of someone casually spending the equivalent of a skyscraper on a pepperoni pizza doesn’t just sound crazy—it feels emotionally unprocessable. It clashes with everything you’ve been taught about saving, investing, and the nature of money. It’s a story that scrambles your internal economic compass.
Laszlo didn’t lose anything that day. He used bitcoins at their intended purpose—as a peer-to-peer currency—when almost nobody else would. He gave them value. That trade proved Bitcoin could function as money, not just code on a screen. He later said he never regretted it, and that he’d do it again just for the joy of moving the project forward.
But no matter how many times you read that, it never fully sinks in. That’s the intractable part. You can understand it intellectually, yet still stare into space thinking about two pizzas that now cost more than a lifetime of luxury. The sheer scale of what that handful of code eventually became makes May 22 a day that the rational mind just cannot fold into shape—and that’s exactly why we still celebrate it. $BTC