I spent all my Bitcoin on two pizzas – I had no idea crypto would be worth TEN MILLION times more…but I have no regrets
A PROGRAMMER made history when he made the first “real world” purchase with Bitcoin more than a decade ago.
When Laszlo Hanyecz ordered two pizzas one fateful lunchtime he had no idea his pang of hunger would cause him to miss out on hundreds of millions of pounds.
The 10,000 Bitcoin Laszlo used to pay for the pies was worth roughly £30 at the time.
But now, 13 years later it’s worth a whopping £350m.
It’s a fortune which could have bought him a Ferrari, a luxurious mansion, and several private jets, but the Florida resident insists he has no regrets over the purchase he made in 2010.
He has said: “I don’t regret it. I think that it’s great that I got to be part of the early history of Bitcoin in that way.
“People know about the pizza…everybody can kind of relate to that and be [like] ‘Oh my God, you spent all of that money!'”
Laszlo contributed to Bitcoin’s software when it was barely a year old.
He even coded a programme that made it possible for fans to mine the currency using their computer’s graphics cards (GPU).
But he had no idea that his life would never be the same when he posted a message on a Bitcoin chat forum on May 22, 2010.
He wrote on Bitcointalk: “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.
“I like things like onions, peppers, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, pepperoni, etc.. just standard stuff no weird fish topping or anything like that.
“If you’re interested please let me know and we can work out a deal.”
Hit post caught the eye of another forum user who agreed to order two large supreme pizzas in return for 10,000 Bitcoin.
“I wanted to do the pizza thing because to me it was free pizza,” Laszlo later explained.
“I mean, I coded this thing and mined Bitcoin and I felt like I was winning the internet that day.
“I got pizza for contributing to an open-source project. Usually hobbies are a time sink and money sink, and in this case, my hobby bought me dinner.
“I was like, ‘Man, I got these GPUs linked together, now I’m going to mine twice as fast. I’m just going to be eating free food; I’ll never have to buy food again.’”
Laszlo believes his infamous fast food lunch even contributed to the incredible explosion of Bitcoin.
He told Cointelegraph: “I’d like to think that what I did helped. But I think if it wasn’t me, somebody else would have come along. And maybe it wouldn’t have been pizza.
“But I think Bitcoin was kind of destined to get big, and I didn’t know everything about bitcoin back then – I mean,
“I had only been playing with it a couple months, and I figured out how to mine, I actually wrote the first GPU miner – and that’s how I got all those bitcoins that I was kind of giving away.”
After the first transaction, Hanyecz would go on to do it many more times and spend a total of 100,000 Bitcoin on pizza that summer – now worth £4.5billion.
To commemorate Lazlo’s legendary transaction, May 22 is dubbed Bitcoin Pizza Day.
Pizza providers worldwide offer discounts to bitcoin users to commemorate the incredible purchase.
However, Laszlo says buying a pizza with crypto cash these days would be impossible.
He said: “If everybody wanted to pay for pizza with bitcoin right now – it wouldn’t work.
“They would try it, they’d realise that their transactions aren’t confirming, and they’d lose interest.”