Laszlo Hanyecz

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 real-world commercial transaction in Bitcoin’s history.

Hanyecz is a software developer based in Jacksonville, Florida. Before the pizza purchase, he had already ported the Bitcoin client to macOS (the first non-Windows version) and become the first person known to have mined Bitcoin with a GPU. He corresponded directly with Satoshi Nakamoto on both.

macOS Port

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 besides Satoshi himself.

GPU Mining Pioneer

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. The archive’s analysis of Satoshi’s design against current reality marks this exact May 2010 exchange as the starting point of the hardware-centralization drift Satoshi’s design did not anticipate.

Bitcoin Pizza Day

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.

Later Years

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…”