Bitcoin Pizza Day pioneer and first GPU miner
On May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two Papa John’s pizzas. At the time, that was worth about $41. At Bitcoin’s peak, the same amount would be worth over $1 billion. The date is now celebrated annually as “Bitcoin Pizza Day” — the first known purchase of a physical good with Bitcoin.
Hanyecz is a software developer based in Jacksonville, Florida. Before the pizza purchase, he had already ported the Bitcoin client to macOS and become the first person known to have mined Bitcoin with a GPU. He corresponded directly with Satoshi Nakamoto on both.
In early 2010, Hanyecz ported the Bitcoin client to macOS, making the software available on Apple’s platform for the first time. He communicated with Satoshi Nakamoto about the port. The port left one concrete trace in the codebase: Hanyecz’s single SVN commit, r123 on August 4, 2010, fixing macOS compilation issues. He is one of only four SVN committers on record, Satoshi included.
Hanyecz was the first person known to have successfully used a GPU (graphics processing unit) to mine Bitcoin, dramatically increasing mining efficiency compared to CPU-only mining. He discussed this development directly with Satoshi, who expressed concern about an “arms race” in mining hardware, preferring that mining remain accessible to ordinary computers for as long as possible. This May 2010 conversation marks the point where mining began drifting toward concentrated hardware, a turn Satoshi’s design did not anticipate.
On May 18, 2010, Hanyecz posted on the BitcoinTalk forum offering 10,000 BTC for two large pizzas. Four days later, on May 22, 2010, a user named jercos (Jeremy Sturdivant) accepted the offer and ordered two Papa John’s pizzas delivered to Hanyecz’s home.
In February 2018, Hanyecz made another symbolic pizza purchase — this time using the Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s layer-2 scaling solution.
In 2011, reflecting on his email exchanges with Satoshi for Wired’s feature on Bitcoin’s rise and fall, Hanyecz said he “always got the impression it almost wasn’t a real person” — the work seemed “awfully well designed for one person to crank out.”
Asked years later by Cointelegraph whether he regretted the original transaction, he answered:
You know, 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, and people know about the pizza and it’s an interesting story because everybody can kind of relate to that…
65 entries / 14 threads
Nearly eight years after the 2010 pizza trade, Hanyecz buys two pizzas over the Lightning Network, with the delivery driver handing them over only when he shows part of the payment preimage.
A curated way in: questions about Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin history, each pointing to the page that answers it in full.
Doubters called it unscalable in 2008. A famed hacker failed to break the code. A judge, a dictionary, and a Nobel nominator weighed in. What others said about Satoshi, read as one record.
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Satoshi coded Bitcoin on Windows for 27 months, mainly with MinGW. In November 2009 he finished the Linux build Martti Malmi had started; by mid-2010 there were Windows, Linux and Mac releases.
Hanyecz recalls his Satoshi correspondence around the April 19, 2010 macOS port. The private emails are unreleased; quotes are from later interviews. He called Satoshi paranoid, bossy, and weird.
Hanyecz recalls Satoshi's private pushback on his May 10, 2010 BitcoinTalk GPU-mining announcement. The verifiable element is the announcement; Satoshi's side comes from Hanyecz's later interviews.
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Complete record of all four developers who had commit access to Bitcoin's SourceForge SVN repository, from August 30, 2009 (r1) to September 13, 2011 (r252).
Benjamin Wallace's Wired feature — an early major mainstream article on Bitcoin. Traces the whitepaper, mining boom, Mt. Gox hack, and growing pains, ending with Garzik's "We really don't care."
Laszlo Hanyecz pays 10,000 BTC, about $41 at the time, for two Papa John's pizzas — the first known purchase of a physical good with Bitcoin. Celebrated annually as Bitcoin Pizza Day.
Hanyecz recalls that when he shared his GPU miner, Satoshi sent his own GPU mining code in return, kept to defend against a possible 51% attack rather than for mining. From later interviews.
Bitcoin v0.3 was released on SourceForge with JSON-RPC control, a daemon version, Mac OS X support, and 20% faster hashing, coinciding with the famous Slashdot posting.
Laszlo Hanyecz posts his famous offer to pay 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas, leading to the first known real-world Bitcoin transaction on May 22, 2010 — now celebrated as Bitcoin Pizza Day.