Things You Didn't Know About Laszlo Hanyecz, The Legend of Bitcoin Pizza Day

Bitcoin fans on Twitter have celebrated this historic moment, the "first real-world purchase" made with Bitcoin, and experts have etched this story into the memory of the Internet community with headlines about the infamous Bitcoin Pizza Purchase, which is now valued at over 1 billion dollars. But what if I told you that Hanyecz spent nearly 10 times the amount of bitcoin after this historical purchase? And what if I told you that perhaps Hanyecz did so as a clear atonement for his much more significant contributions to Bitcoin during its uncertain early stages? He is a Pioneer in Bitcoin Technology The obscurity in Hanyecz's Pizza Day buyout activity has overshadowed his two significant contributions to the early technical development of Bitcoin.

The first of these took place on April 19, 2010, just a few days after Hanyecz registered on Bitcointalk, a forum established by Satoshi Nakamoto, which is ( and still is ) the gathering place for Bitcoin technology intellectuals. Hanyecz created the first MacOS client for Bitcoin Core, the original implementation software and still predominant for nodes supporting the Bitcoin network. Satoshi initially coded Bitcoin for Windows and Linux, but Hanyecz's innovation allowed MacOS devices to run this software. His contribution laid the foundation for all MacOS-supported bitcoin wallets and subsequent applications. But it can be said even more significantly that Hanyecz's discovery that he could mine bitcoin using the (GPU) of his computer. Up to this point, the early users had used their (CPU) computer processors to mine bitcoin, and because GPUs are many times more powerful than CPUs for this task, this innovation has accelerated the bitcoin mining process much faster than Satoshi expected. "Updated the Mac OS X binary file... It will use your GPU to generate bitcoin. This is really effective if you have a good GPU like the NVIDIA 8800 or something similar," Hanyecz wrote in a post on Bitcointalk on May 10, 2010. This discovery sparked the first digital gold rush of Bitcoin. The total hashrate of Bitcoin surged by 130,000% by the end of the year, and for the first time, bitcoin miners began to build small-scale mining farms. These setups - built in basements and attics, garages, and warehouses - are prototypes for the industrial-scale bitcoin mining farms that dominate the Bitcoin network today. Hanyecz's invention had such a significant impact that it earned him genuine support from Satoshi Nakamoto. And perhaps the subsequent conversation inspired Hanyecz's famous Pizza Day purchase. "A major attraction for new users is that anyone with a computer can create some free coins," Satoshi wrote to Hanyecz. "GPU will limit the motivation to only those with high-end GPU hardware. It is inevitable that GPU computing clusters will eventually take all the coins created, but I do not want that day to come too soon." In a 2019 interview for Bitcoin Magazine, Hanyecz told me that he had "stopped advertising [GPU mining] after that." Hanyecz said: "I thought, 'Oh my God, I feel like I ruined your project. Sorry, buddy.' He worried that some people might get discouraged because they can't mine a block with CPU." Perhaps this conversation prompted Hanyecz to make the offer of 10,000 BTC for two large Papa John's pizzas on that fateful day in May 15 years ago. In fact, he made this offer more than once. In a 2019 interview, Hanyecz told me that he spent nearly 100,000 BTC the following year. "I spent [all my bitcoin] on pizza a long time ago," Hanyecz wrote in a post on Bitcointalk in February 2014. "Aside from a little change, I have spent all the money I mined. As you all know, the difficulty increases to adjust to hash power, so in the end, mining is no longer worth it for me." When looking at the Bitcoin address that Hanyecz listed in the first post on Bitcointalk, Hanyecz received and spent 81.432 BTC from this address from April to November 2010. This amount is currently worth a little over 8.6 billion dollars. Wallet balance history in 2010 of Laszlo Hanyecz | Source: Mempool.space There is no way to verify whether Hanyecz spent this amount on pizza, other goods, or if he simply gifted bitcoin to new Bitcointalk members, a common practice at the time when bitcoin was nearly worthless. But he mentioned in his original thread about buying pizza that it was "an open offer," although he declined in August, stating, "I really can't afford to keep doing this because I can't make thousands of coins every day anymore. Thank you to everyone who bought pizza for me." The initial purchase, not counting the repeat purchases that seemed to have happened afterward, would be enough to keep any sane person awake at night when Bitcoin rises above $100,000. But at least in 2019, Hanyecz endured this challenge with humor. In his view, he performed culinary alchemy, transforming his electricity and computing power into a cheap dinner. He had no idea that Bitcoin would be worth what it is today, so this transaction was a win in his book. "An exchange happens because both sides think they are getting a good deal," he said. "I feel like I'm beating the internet, getting free food. I thought, 'Wow, I've linked these GPUs together, now I'm going to mine twice as fast. I'll just eat free food; I'll never have to buy food again..."

"What I mean is, I coded this thing and mined bitcoin, and I felt like I had won the internet that day. I got pizza for contributing to an open-source project. Usually, hobbies are things that consume time and money, and in this case, my hobby helped me get dinner."