Happy Bitcoin Pizza Day to all you celebraters. You might be wondering what we're celebrating. Wednesday's “holiday” marks the anniversary of the day in 2010 when Laszlo Hanyecz had two pizzas delivered to his house from Papa John's and paid for them with Bitcoin, Quartz reports. (How he did that specifically is a little unclear; you can see his original post about trading Bitcoin for pizza on the Bitcoin forum.) This was the first documented purchase made using the then-nascent cryptocurrency. Hanyecz paid 10,000 Bitcoin for the pizzas, an amount that would be worth $700 million today. They had no actual value at the time because they weren't being used to buy anything yet, but Quartz estimates their value at about $41 (what Hanyecz would have been able to sell them for at the time). The pizzas went for about $25.
Hanietz has said in interviews since that fateful day that he has no regrets. Sun I will report. “I wanted to work on pizza because to me it was free pizza,” he once explained, noting that he wrote a program that could mine Bitcoin using a computer graphics card. “So I coded this and mined Bitcoin, and that day I felt like I won the internet. I contributed to an open source project and got a pizza. Usually, hobbies are time-consuming. It's a waste and a waste of money, but in this case, my hobby bought me dinner.'' He also added, “If it wasn't me, someone else would have come. And maybe it's not the pizza.'' “There probably wasn't.” (More on Bitcoin.)