Tomorrow the Bitcoin community celebrates the anniversary of the first time that Bitcoin was used to buy something, according to internet lore.
As Calvin Tran of Cryptocoin News reports:
In 2010, Florida programmer and BitcoinTalk user Laszlo Hanyecz offered to pay 10,000 Bitcoins for pizza. This transaction is famously known throughout the cryptocommunity as the first real world transaction/purchase used with Bitcoin. It is now known as Bitcoin Pizza Day.
Hanyecz posted on BitcoinTalk that he would give 10,000 bitcoins to anyone who brought him a pizza. Someone in the U.K. took him up on it, ordered two pizzas from Papa John's in Hanyecz’s area, paid $25 for them, and got the 10,000 bitcoins in exchange.
And Bitcoin Pizza Day, May 22, was born.
Bitcoins had no real value back then. They were estimated to be worth 0.003 cents each, Tran reports. So 10,000 of them were theoretically worth about $30. So at the time, Hanyecz’s was kind of getting the pizza for free.
Flash forward four years. If the person hung onto those 10,000 coins, with bitcoin hitting $500 again on Wednesday, that person would have $5 million worth of bitcoins today. That's more than a fair trade for $25 worth of pizza.
That person would also be able to spend them at a whole bunch of places, including more than 100 pizza joints, according to SpendCoin.com.
If you want to celebrate Bitcoin Pizza Day but your local pizza place doesn't accept them, Tran has this suggestion:
eGifter, an online retailer specializing in electronic gift cards, is celebrating Bitcoin Pizza Day by giving an extra point per dollar spent on pizza-related gift card purchases on May 22 made with Bitcoin, Litecoin, and even Dogecoin.
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