You may have read out there that today, May 22, is World Bitcoin Day. However, this is not entirely accurate. What is being celebrated today is “Bitcoin Pizza Day”, a holiday intended to remember the day on which the first purchase of a good using Bitcoin took place.
On May 22, 2010, the first payment for a good using Bitcoins took place
It took place on May 22, 2010 and the responsible was a popular bitcoin user, named Laszlo Hanyecz, who already days before had anticipated his wish on the forum named : “I wish to buy two large pizzas with 10,000 bitcoins as a form of payment. Two large pizzas, so that I have something left for the next day, as I like to eat pizza later in the day”.
Laszlo Hanyecz gave more details in the forum post. In fact, he pointed out that it didn’t matter if the pizza was homemade or if someone ordered it from a fast food service. The important thing is that it arrived at his home and that the 10,000 bitcoins were accepted as “currency of exchange”, since he had no other resource or possibility to prepare the pizza himself.
Nor was Hanyecz very picky about toppings. According to him, he liked “onions, sausages, peppers, mushrooms, tomatoes…” but, yes, the pizza better not include fish (in case you were wondering, he didn’t say anything about pineapple).
The payment he was offering, 10,000 bitcoins, represented at the time $41 at the exchange rate (today the value of Bitcoin has reached $55,000) and given the figure it represented at the time, it was not very popular among forum members either.
That said, after four days of waiting, Laszlo Hanyecz received the two pizzas at his home and paid the 10,000 bitcoins to the person who sent them to himstudent Jeremy Sturdivant, who had contacted him through the mythical IRC chat. Let us hope that Sturdivant did not get rid of this virtual currency quickly and amassed a substantial fortune.
This was how Laszlo became the first person in the world to acquire an asset using bitcoins, and Sturdivant the first person to sell it by accepting this virtual cryptocurrency as currency.
Today thousands of transactions are made daily with Bitcoin in the world, but the date of May 22, 2010 has remained for the memory, and in his honor is celebrated today the Bitcoin Pizza Day, a day in which many pizzerias around the world… allow to pay with Bitcoins.
