Bitcoin Pizza Day has arrived, and this year it’s marked by an extraordinary milestone: the value of the famous pizza purchase has soared to over $1.1 billion.
Fifteen years ago, programmer Laszlo Hanyecz made history by buying two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins – a payment that was valued at about $40 at the time. Today, that same amount of bitcoin is worth more than $1.1 billion, coinciding with Bitcoin’s (COIN:BTCUSD) fresh all-time high above $111,800 early Thursday.
The May 22, 2010 transaction is widely recognized as the first documented commercial use of Bitcoin, transforming the cryptocurrency from a niche digital experiment into a usable form of money.
With current pizza prices, those 10,000 bitcoins could buy over 70 million pizzas. Despite the staggering value increase, Hanyecz has downplayed the idea of “lost fortune,” telling CBS in 2019 that the purchase helped make Bitcoin feel “real” to him. He had mined those bitcoins when their value was just fractions of a cent, long before anyone imagined the cryptocurrency’s rise into the trillions.
This pizza purchase has since become a symbolic event in crypto culture, demonstrating that digital currency can be used for everyday transactions. Today, Bitcoin is accepted for a range of goods and services, from real estate and automobiles to, in some cases, even tax payments.